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Class 12

English Elective: Kaleidoscope

96 lessons in 21 chapters, explained in plain words.

I Sell My Dreams

  1. What a short story is
  2. Frau Frieda, the woman who sold dreams
  3. Neruda, the dream and the ending
  4. Language: emphasis and syllables

Eveline

  1. Eveline at the window
  2. Frank, the organ and the promise
  3. At the North Wall
  4. Language: parallelism and word stress

A Wedding in Brownsville

  1. Dr Margolin before the wedding
  2. The journey and the wedding hall
  3. Raizel and the twilight world
  4. Language: sentence variety and stress

Tomorrow

  1. Captain Hagberd and Colebrook
  2. Bessie at the fence
  3. Bessie's life with her father
  4. The stranger at the gate
  5. Harry the wanderer
  6. The ending
  7. Language: allusion and stress shift

One Centimetre

  1. Tao Ying and the bus ticket
  2. A mother as an example
  3. At the temple gate
  4. Measuring, mistrust and the letter
  5. Vindication
  6. Language: simile, metaphor and noun-verb stress

A Lecture Upon the Shadow

  1. Poetry and the metaphysical poets
  2. Shadows of love
  3. Donne's English

Poems by Milton

  1. Milton's 'On Time'
  2. Milton's 'On Shakespear'
  3. Etymology: where words come from

Poems by Blake

  1. Blake and 'The Divine Image'
  2. 'The Human Abstract'
  3. Blake's craft

Kubla Khan

  1. Coleridge and the dream
  2. Xanadu and the chasm
  3. The damsel and the poet
  4. Music and facts behind the poem

Trees

  1. Emily Dickinson and the summer sky
  2. Creatures and flowers
  3. Words and instruments

The Wild Swans at Coole

  1. Yeats at Coole
  2. The unchanging swans
  3. Rhyme scheme

Time and Time Again

  1. Ramanujan and the city's clocks
  2. The silent clock

Blood

  1. Kamala Das and the dying house
  2. The oldest blood
  3. Death of the matriarch, death of the house
  4. Conscience and change

Freedom

  1. Non-fiction, and Shaw on natural slavery
  2. Governments, votes and propaganda
  3. The deluded masters
  4. Distribution, laws and employers
  5. Leisure
  6. Krishnamurti: freedom and discipline
  7. Language: clauses, rhetorical questions and sound sequences

The Mark on the Wall

  1. Woolf and the mark
  2. Losses, speed and what comes after
  3. Self-image and phantoms
  4. Barrows, antiquaries and knowledge
  5. Nature's game, the tree and the snail
  6. Language: content and function words; strong and weak forms

Film-making

  1. Cranes, Venice and a magic lantern
  2. The film-maker as conjurer
  3. From impression to rhythm
  4. Books, audiences and teachers
  5. The tightrope and the cathedral
  6. Umberto Eco on books and films
  7. Language: film terms, sentence parts and elision

Why the Novel Matters

  1. The living hand
  2. Man alive versus the specialists
  3. The one bright book of life
  4. No absolutes: change, integrity and living
  5. Language: borrowed words, roots, verbs and spellings

The Argumentative Indian

  1. A talkative tradition
  2. Krishna and Arjuna: duty and consequences
  3. Women in the argumentative tradition
  4. Caste, class and dissent
  5. Democracy as public reasoning
  6. Language: words of speech, qualification and noun phrases

On Science Fiction

  1. The prescientific universe
  2. Gods, magic and wonder
  3. Myths and science fiction: the same need
  4. Science fiction: defined by background
  5. Can a science fiction mystery be fair?
  6. Language: allusions, tone groups and transitive verbs

Chandalika

  1. Drama and the story of Chandalika
  2. 'Give me water': a new birth
  3. The demand and the spell
  4. The mirror and the agony
  5. Remorse and release

Broken Images

  1. The celebrity's speech
  2. The image speaks
  3. Malini, Pramod and the unasked questions
  4. Monologue, image and the language debate