The purpose of this paper is to identify the possible changes in the aims and objectives of English literature courses at the undergraduate (UG) program. This is a feasible and relevant endeavor because without further radical restructuring of syllabi UG programs would soon become both irrelevant and uninspiring. There are two levels at which the problem needs to be addressed: ideal and practical. Ideally, we should be able to design a syllabi that would make the subscribers of the program fluent users of the English language and offer exposure to literary/cultural traditions that expand their horizon of imagination. Practically, we should develop syllabi which are freed from the prison house of canon. This paper suggests that in restructuring the syllabi, we need to expand the literary discourses studied and accommodate more contemporary interests.

English studies have a tendency apparently to come into crisis once in every generation. In India, however, this crisis seems to be permanent, whether acknowledged or not. Coupled with its status of `ruling tongue' English seems to forever be unteachable, thus enabling the perpetuation of the class divide—for there exists a distinction in India between those who `have access to English' and those who `have not'. Formulation of strategies to overcome this challenge of `unteachability' and developing `models' of effective English teaching have become an all season industry within English studies in India. Except a few metropolitan centers of learning apart, in most colleges, English studies is a schizophrenic exercise, the divide between teaching literature and language threatening to make English teaching/learning a Sisyphusian task. This paper, a product of the same permanent and distressing crisis, hopes to suggest radical goals for literature syllabi of the undergraduate courses that can also contribute to language acquisition.

The question that troubles an investigator of the issue of the English syllabi is the divide between the aims and objectives of such a course for the prescribers and for the subscribers. The prescribers—the universities/colleges—aim at an intrinsic value from the sum of all the chosen texts. They hope to communicate to the subscribers—the learners—the `putative' value of the texts prescribed for study. This results in a situation where a majority of the subscribers develop the habit of attributing inviolable sanctity to every text/author they have studied as part of their education. The processes by which such values accrue to a text hardly ever comes to be a matter of teaching-learning. This pedagogic tendency conditions literary study as a passive devotional exercise in which the students as subscribers can never bring their everyday experiences to their understanding of the literary texts. They cannot develop sensitive and historical understanding of the cultural contexts of the literary works they come to `venerate'. The subscriber of a pedagogic program in literature should be able to expand his/her horizon of imagination to be culturally more empowered and cosmopolitan in sympathies. The present structure of the syllabi aims precisely at the opposite goal of making the learner possess a determinate sum of skills and reproducible bits of information.

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