LITERATURE
Death of a Discipline
Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak
Rs 275.00
ISBN 8170462592
For
almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has been ignoring the
standardized 'rules' of the academy arid trespassing across disciplinary
boundaries. Today she remains one of die foremost figures in the study
of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she
declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds
an urgent call for a 'new comparative literature' in which the discipline
is given new life--one that is not appropriated and determined by the
market.
In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature
in
translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we protect
the
multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Spivak demonstrates
how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to
literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph
Conrad's. Heart of Darkness; and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Through close readings of texts not only in English, French, and German
but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practices what she preaches.
Gentlemen
Poets in Colonial Bengal
Emergent
Nationalism and the Orientalist Project
Rosinka Chaudhuri
Rs 550.00 £ 19.95 $ 25.95
ISBN 81 7046 185 5
222pp
Extensive
historical research and a detailed exam-ination of the English poetry
written by Indians in the nineteenth century in its social, historical
and political contexts, reveals the engagement of the colonized with one
of the implements of colonization, the English language. This study shows
how the intertextuality that existed between this body of verse and concurrent
Orientalist scholarship on the ancient Indian her-itage resulted, ultimately,
in a complex appropri-ation, by the Indians, of British scholarship on
India for nationalist, literary, social, and personal ends.
The author examines works by Henry Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael
Madhusudan Dutt, the Dutt family, and, in conclusion, the poems of Toru
Dutt and Tagore.
Review
Bruised Memories
Communal Violence and the Writer
edited and introduced by
Tarun K. Saint
Price Rs 475 £
19.95 $25.95
ISBN 81 7046 190 1
This unusual volume explores India's history of recurring communal violence through the feelings and emotions, both of creative persons—writers, poets, artists—and of those who comment on society and
politics. Poems, short stories, memoirs, and essays together probe how it feels when violence erupts, turning neighbours into enemies and home into an alien land.
Contributors include
Amitav Ghosh, Amlan Das Gupta, Anjan Sen, Ashis Nandy, Badiuzzaman, Bhisham Sahni, Bilquis Zafirul Hasan,
D. R. Nagaraj, Deeba Zafir, Dilip Jhaveri, Dilip Simeon, Harish Trivedi, Husain-ul-Haq,
K. Satchidanandan, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Mahasweta Devi, M. K. R. Nair, M. V. Narayan, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Naghma Zafir, Ranjit Hoskote
Review
|
