This course is predominantly intended to help students towards formulating and structuring their proposals. The latter part of the course will therefore be devoted to the discussion, critique and rewriting of proposals.

 Towards this end, students will be required to collect and sift the various kinds of reading that will help them define their focus, approach and object of study.  Some part of each class will be devoted to a discussion of approaches and questions in the light of each research interest.

 Aside from introducing sources that will lay out the protocols of thesis writing in its simplest form, the course readings will present some crucial debates within the social sciences over what its methodologies and objects of study should be.

 It is suggested that we adopt a two-pronged approach to all readings, by examining on the one hand what changes are effected within the social sciences with a shift in methodology,  and on the other, treating the readings as samples of writing, tracing how the argument moves, and how the text is structured.

Session 1.Readings:

Archibald, MacLeish ;Ars Poetica. Link found here

Roland Barthes,What is writing in Writing Degree Zero, (9-18p) Link found here

Roland Barthes,Political Modes of Writing in Writing Degree Zero,(19-28p) Link found here

Cary Nelson,Problematising Interpretation:Some opening questions in Theory in the class room.(3-8p) Link found here

Gerard Delanty,Positivism,Science and the Politics of Knowledge in Social science:beyond constructivism and Realism(11-38p) Link found here

Belsey Catherine;Butler, Fish, and Lyotard, In Culture and the Real. Routledge. 2005. pp 1-19.

Session 2.

Martin Hollis, Introduction: problems of Structure and Action in The Philosophy of social science:an introduction(Ch1-1-22p) Link found here

Martin Hollis,Discovering truth:the rationalist way in The Philosophy of social science:an introduction

(Ch 2-22-39p) Link found here

Martin Hollis,Ants, Spiders and Bees: a third way? in The Philosophy of social science:an introduction

(Ch 4-1-22p) Link found here

Session 3.

Readings from Karl Marx and Gramsci.

Session 4.

Mulvey, Laura; 1989; Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; Visual and Other Pleasures; Bloomington; Indiana University Press; 14-26 Link found here

Udaya Kumar, Self,body and inner sense:Some reflections on Sree Narayana Guru and Kumar Asan
Willard Van Orman Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html

Session 5.

Udaya Kumar, Seeing and Reading: The  Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of Visibility in Early Novels in India ., Edited by Meenkshi Mukherjee;New Delhi, Sahitya Akademi,2002(161-192p) Link found here

Session 6.

Ann Grodzins Gold; Bhoju Ram Gujar; in The Past of Nature and the Nature of the Past in In the time of trees and sorrows:nature, power, and memory in Rajasthan(1-29p and 328-334p) Link found here

Tejaswini Niranjana and Vivek Dhareshwar; Kaadalan and the Politics of Resignification.Link found here