Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Sex and the Aesthetics of the Vulgar: : Reading the Creative Paradox in the Works of Robert Crumb
Get PDFInformed by the #MeToo movement, the following paper is an attempt to revisit the allegations of misogyny in the works of Robert Crumb, the founder of the Underground Comix Movement. Now more than ever it becomes relevant to talk about Crumb not only because of his unconventional modes of expression which often verged on the levels of obscenity and seemingly outright misogynistic but also because of the curious reason—why he chose the very particular mode of sexual objectivity in his works that has been read as pornography. The paper perceives a chasm between general perception of art and the artist’s conception of it and attempts to read it as a ‘creative paradox’. The allegations and criticisms received by the works of Crumb, the paper will argue, are generated from this paradox. Finally, the paper would attempt to look beyond extreme ideologies to bring home the idea of artistic expression and freedo
Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency:: A Reading of the Poems of J. H. Prynne
Get PDFGeography’s relation to the creation of a national identity has indelibly influenced different forms of literary writing. In the late capitalist age, the incommensurability of the territorial entity of the nation and physically experienced space cause us to delve deeper into the practices that interpellate us as inhabitants of a democratic nation-space. The scalar fluidity of an individual’s identity is figured by the different ways in which language emulates the social and personal identity of the individual. The virtual nature of the modern democratic state-form where power essentially appears as an empty place is counteracted upon by the poetic language of the late modern British poet J.H. Prynne. Through a study of his two poems (published in the poetry collection Kitchen Poems, 1968) this essay will look into the ways in which individual lives are intertwined with the functioning of economic capital in the state. In an age following the proverbial incursion of the economy into the affective premises of life, Prynne’s language attempts to give agency to the individual caught in the functioning of multiple discourses, separating every day from the pervasive abstractions of high finance resource mobilizations. This task of locating the individual’s identity is done by identifying the connections that the individual shares with the land and by uncovering the material basis of political identity
“I’m a refugee from the past”:: The Function of Nostalgia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Get PDFNotably, Margaret Atwood prefers to call her future-oriented novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction,” in order to foreground its characteristic as a cautionary tale which is extrapolated from things and events in the past. In this sense, prediction is deeply connected with history, or nostalgia; the future is something already embedded in the past, and Atwood’s task is to (re-)discover it, not to create it. Meanwhile, criticisms of Atwood’s dystopia tend to evaluate the protagonist’s resistance to authority either as defeatist or militant. Yet what is lacking from these lines of argument is a close re-examination of the concept of resistance itself, which could be achieved by the analysis of nostalgia. As working models for exploring various aspects of nostalgia in The Handmaid’s Tale, the following types are presented: forbidden nostalgia, mythophilia and inhibited nostalgia. The analysis of nostalgia will be combined with that of the notion of trauma; although it appears to be an opposite concept, Offred’s narrative proves that they can be dialectically intertwined. In particular, what is striking in Offred’s nostalgia is that it is rather repetition compulsion than a longing, and homesickness is presented as a chronic condition; this characteristic can be traced back to Atwood’s more explicitly nostalgic novel, Surfacing (1972). Offred is always/already a refugee; her resistance is centred on her refusal of the one-dimensional conception of time and space, yet at the same time, Offred remains as “a blank […] between parentheses. Between other people”
Commodification of Censorship in Iranian Writing in English
Get PDFThis paper examines the commodification of censorship and banning in relation to the cultural products that are emerging from and about Iran in the West. Using books written by the Iranian diaspora in English as example, it highlights the often ironic emphasis where a cultural product/idea that has been oppressed, banned or censored in Iran is taken up vicariously in the West under the illusion that it has overcome that censorship/oppression by the virtue of being presented in the West, only to be read again in a definitive and biased framework that identifies it as a censored or banned piece of work. It pays attention to how the commodification of censorship offers an illusionary shift in a power relationship where under the guise of Western liberation, the creators feel a sense of freedom, agency and powerfulness by being heard and seen against those oppressions that they previously faced, only with the reality being that in some ways their work and voices are ironically contributing to further emphasizing stereotypical understandings and power relations between the East and the West. 
Is Critique “Universal”?:: Swift’s Drapier’s Letters and the Possibility of Universal Public Reason
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This article seeks to examine the dimension of “courage” or “risk” involved in the exercise of critique through a genealogical survey in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on Parrhēsia and an examination of Jonathan Swift’s Drapier’s Letters as an exemplar depicting the contours of “norm” in 18th century public discourse. The tension between norm, truth and freedom of speech would be brought out to examine the censorship, intrinsic to the foundation of universal public reason that is pointed out by Judith Butler in her critique of the Habermasian model of public discourse. The vocabulary of public discourse will be assessed to understand whether universal normativity can at all be achieved
What are You Trying to Say?:: World Literature and the Frustration of Translation
Get PDFAt the heart of World Literature lies a tension between translation and the texts’ position in the world. This essay argues that whilst translation dichotomously offers a teleological understanding of texts, it fails to grapple with the deep cultural milieus that manufacture texts. Thus, whilst translation offers an awareness of the text, it further de-centralises the text and author. Translation further emphasises the power literary institutions have over texts written from the fringes. Finally, this essay grapples with the dialectic between texts drawing meaning from the centre, and texts that are written from the fringes acquiring meaning in the centre. This centre is an institutional figment, often seen to be the European literary canon
Cinematic Logic and the Function of the Cut
Get PDFThis paper investigates the essentially ‘Lacanian’ function of the cut in cinematic logic, arguing that the historical relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is rooted in their shared logic of elision and division. However, while standard cinematic practice is to disavow the cut (through the repressive operation of ‘suture’) so as to construct and conserve the filmic ‘fantasy’ and thereby strengthen the imaginary, psychoanalysis contrarily seeks to directly attain to the real by traversing the fantasy along the lines of the cut. In examining this ‘diverging convergence’, the paper looks to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, whose celebrated films cut across both sides of the divide, providing the comfort of ‘imaginary resolution’ while at the same time undermining this equilibrium by directly invoking the real in the form and figure of the cut. In particular, the paper examines how Hitchcock’s films supplement the various cuts constitutive of cinema’s very being with an additional ‘foundational cut’; a cut that is equally formative of the film itself, but which simultaneously introduces a fundamentally determinative rift in this world, a central hole around which everything – plot, image, dialogue, etc. – twists and turns (and which is, moreover, intimately tied to Lacan’s formulation of the subject-object relation). The paper then goes on to address two key questions arising from this examination: what becomes of the suture when cinema, like psychoanalysis, truly acknowledges the cut and traverses its own fantasy; and (following Žižek) is there really a ‘proper’ way to remake a (Hitchcock) film
Strategic Outsiderism of Fyatarus: : Performances of Resistance by ‘Multitudes’ after ‘Empire’
Get PDFThis paper would talk about a transition from a pattern of life where there were limited resources, possibilities and aspirations, to one which promises uninterrupted flow of capital and resources in the present context of West Bengal. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) came to power in Bengal in 1978 after the period of Emergency with promises and hopes for the oppressed classes. However with the emergence of neo-liberal form of capitalism, the Left party, just as the Right, could not but respond to the necessity for transformation towards a post-Fordist economy, characterized more by consumption and less by production. In this re-conceptualization of capital, the concern that has to be addressed is that of marginalization and resistance. This essay would discuss how this resistance would emerge from the existential locations that could not be accommodated within the nexus of dominant power structure, resulting in breakdown in communication between state and its multitudes. These locations emerge from structures of deprivation internal to the Empire. This would be illustrated through a series of short stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya which talks about a group of fictitious flying characters called ‘fyatarus’. They are people variously marginalized and they participate together in acts of damage that emerge out of immediacy rather than any coherent political program
Victory Colony, 1950 by Bhaswati Ghosh: New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2020, Paperback ₹ 499
Get PDF“Who is going to write their stories when no one even cares whether they exist or not?- MANAS DUTTA, DIARY ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1950” (Ghosh 77)This is how Manas Dutta, one of the central characters of Bhaswati Ghosh’s first work of fiction, Victory Colony, 1950, ends his ‘DIARY ENTRY’ and the poignant question strikes at the heart of the ideological underpinnings of Refugee Studies at large
The Perforated Curtain:: Configuring the Public and the Private in Calcutta’s Cabin Culture
Get PDFWhen I was very young, eating out was not a regular activity for our family. On one of such rare occasion we ended up in a restaurant where the waiter made us sit in a cubicle with a curtain on one side