Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Negative Externalities of Modern Development:: The Continuing Relevance of Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja
Get PDF The land for an indigenous community is a significant part of their collective consciousness. However, the economic model of growth that India adopted post-independence did not accommodate the idea of tribal territorial sovereignty. Ill-conceived industrial policy coupled with the failure of land reforms in most parts of the country displaced these peoples, severing the primordial links they had with their land. This paper would undertake a study of issues like legislative nomenclature for tribal groups, their subjection to structures of marginalisation and environmental cost shifting as the contemporary backdrop against which Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja can be read. Paraja posits the inalienable autochthonous identity of a tribe rendered vulnerable to the logic of postcolonial capitalism. The paper seeks to explore the role played by the novel in articulating the worldview of an indigenous community. The mythical universe of the Parajas would be studied vis-à-vis Levi-Strauss’s structuralist discourse on myths. A modern state’s phallocentric gaze upon native land and resources would be addressed in conjunction with the ideas of bioregionalism and ecological nationalism
Book Review of Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept by Timothy Clark
Get PDFIn literary criticism, the term ‘ecocriticism’ is employed to capture the various aspects of the relation between literature and environment; it “expresses a desire to bring to the study of literature the concerns of ecopolitics” (Egan 33-34). Timothy Clark brings together his expertise in philosophy, literature and literary theory in addressing the question of ecocriticism, giving directions as well as discussing the possible challenges this task might encounter
Theatre Theory and Performance: A Critical Introduction: Siddhartha Biswas. United Kingdom, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Paperback. £41.37
Get PDFSiddhartha Biswas’s book Theatre Theory and Performance takes a leap from the aesthetic representation and orients itself towards the socio-political aspects of theatre. The author aims to present the transition in agendas within theatre from Aristotle to the present day by giving us the view of different schools of thought and leading us towards a syncretic model of theatre
Women’s ‘Defence-Narrative’ and its Role in the Formation of the Novel
Get PDFThe practice of women defending themselves in writing, which is often called the “women’s defence-narrative,” is a tradition that emerged in the late medieval period and continued as a dominant strain in women’s writing through the early modern period. There have been studies on how Daniel Defoe, usually considered to be the first major English novelist, relied heavily on latter-day authors of the women’s defence-narrative, such as Mary Carleton. But there still remains room for detailed studies (as far as the history of the novel as a genre is concerned) critically examining the role played by the women’s defence-narratives in the formation of the novel. This article attempts to outline its history, with an emphasis on the seventeenth-century examples that contributed so importantly to the formation of the novel
Can Speech and Translation be Part of Academic Writing?
Get PDFThe objective of this paper is two-fold. First, it addresses the privileging of writing over speech in the undergraduate, postgraduate and research programmes in English in select central universities of India. The shortlisting criteria for Assistant Professors also show an emphasis on writing. The paper proposes that academic writing courses should address the lack of exposure to the spoken word. Secondly, the paper suggests that a course on academic writing should include ‘translation’ of contemporary literary texts in India as a necessary component in the curriculum. Along with training students in the art of translation, such a course can provide a platform for publication of the translated texts during the course duration itself. Through such projects, this course would not only contribute to the corpus of Indian texts available in English, but will also harvest skilled writers/translators who can draw upon Indian texts as themes for their academic writing
Consciousness (with Mutilation) by Anthony Howell:: The Odd Volumes of The Fortnightly Review. Les Brouzils, France, 2019, Paperback, $18.00/£15.00.
Get PDFConsciousness (with Mutilation), published in 2019, is a semi-autobiographical novel by Anthony Howell, a novelist, performance artist, poet, and founder of The Theatre of Mistakes. Howell has also published In the Company of Others (1986), Oblivion (2002), and some poetry collections
The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts ed. Debaditya Bhattacharya:: New Delhi: Routledge, 2019, Hardback, ₹ 995.
Get PDFAn ontological vis-à-vis teleological enquiry of the journey of the university since its inception in the medieval Europe down to the neoliberal developments/challenges of the universities from the former colonies foregrounds the liminalities and contestations pertaining to its discursive and non-linear progression
The Impossible Demands of Nabarun Bhattacharya
Get PDFThis article aims at understanding the character of ‘Fyataru’ that the Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya created. This character returns again and again in many of Nabarun’s stories and novels. It is an important signifier of Nabarun’s literary vision, since it represents the politics of dissent that the author believed in most prominently. Through the dissection of the fictional Fyataru, this article aims to understand the politics that guided Nabarun’s writings. It also tries to determine the philosophy behind this journey of fiction, the history of Nabarun’s thought, as well as its broader implications in contemporary reality. Reading Nabarun’s literature in the light of the theory of anarchism illuminates the purpose of Fyataru, and how this fictional creature can identify its own reflection in individuals of today’s society who have tried to rebel against institutional oppression with the weapon of anarchist practices. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and other underground activists may well be considered as such anarchists. The article also attempts to understand why anarchy is an essential element in a society regulated by governments, capitalist institutions and corporate powers. It aims to establish that anarchy protects the freedom of expression from being thwarted by populist hegemony, and therefore protects the right of the individual to free thought and dissent. The only instrument that can prevent dominant opinions from marginalizing and throttling the formation of free ideas is subversion, and the Fyatarus of Nabarun’s literature are the harbingers of such subversion
Texts of Power, Acts of Dissent: : Performability and Theatricality in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Short Stories
Get PDFNabarun Bhattacharya is often hailed as the “rebel” writer and two of his larger fictional works, Herbert and Kangal Malshat (War Cry of Beggars) have been adapted for screen and stage. However, Nabarun’s short stories may also be understood as texts that show possibilities of being conceived as political performances. This paper wishes to read a few of Nabarun’s short stories like Bhashan, Aguner Mukh, Ondho Beral, Kaktarua, Fyataru and Basanta Utshab E Fyataru, through the concept of performability. Developing on the theoretical framework for performance as a political act (Randy Martin, 1990), this paper further underscores the themes of ritual, banality of re-performance, violence and theatricality in looking at the thematic progression of the selected short stories as three paired units of analysis. How do we locate Nabarun’s prose within this performability of “subversive meanings Can we read the Fyatarus as containing the possibilities of re-performance as opposed to the relentless tediousness of meaningless ritual? Does the coupling of grim description with black humour make his texts rife with possibilities of performable experiments? This paper attempts to answer these questions by studying the selected short stories in their movement from exposition to climax and to bathetic resolution within performance
World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent eds. Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro: Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, Hardback, £ 79.99.
Get PDFWith the rise of far-right nationalism and at the edge of centre-left reformism, neoliberalism has been under severe scrutiny in regards not only to the world-system but also in the cultural atmosphere in recent times