Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
Not a member yet
228 research outputs found
Sort by
James M. Cain and the Naturalistic Hardboiled
Get PDFEven if James M. Cain’s novels are officially identified as “hardboiled,” they plumb the depths of Zolaesque naturalism beyond the shadow of a doubt. Cainian naturalism taps into the ideas of the Italian school of criminology while adding more recent viewpoints because the naturalistic work developed up to a new era, a period of impressive medical, psychological and sociological progress. Furthermore, hardboiled writers, even if they held fast to detective and Mafiosi stories, prepared the ground for a new representation of criminological-oriented art – professional criminals had started to make room for neophytes and empowered women. This paper points out the obvious similarities between European naturalism and American hardboiled. Characters are beasts in which ferocity always seems to be about to rouse. The downfalls often surface from overwhelming figures of authority. The ghosts of the victims, the lawyers or the boss stop the couples in their tracks. The passionate and bloody impetus they had stops dead. But they had previously been warned; naturalism and the hardboiled fiction disseminate omens. From Zola’s to Cain’s, storylines have fatalistic hues
Notes on Rhet/Comp, Ideology, and the Classroom in Delhi and Buffalo
Get PDFFor many English department graduate students in America who have completed their earlier higher education in India, the teaching of writing and rhetoric and composition, or rather “rhet/comp,” can be puzzling, though this is changing with the proliferation of writing centers and academic writing courses in some Indian universities. Having taught composition in classrooms in India, as well as now in the American university where I am a graduate student, I find comparing the two experiences strange yet necessary. Therefore, I have in this article collected observations on the ideological ecosystem which informs my teaching now, along with reflections on classrooms where I have taught before. With this, I also offer comments on Delhi University and its emerging environment of writing instruction to see what lies ahead, and what we might want to think of as we continue to make composition syllabi for our students
Chaora Bhaora
Get PDFLiterary translation can be a political act with immanent failure. It may want to restorethe ‘original’ into the target language only with the consciousness of the impossibility todo so. One has the desire for translation because the ‘untranslated’ is absent in the targetlanguage
Poems from North Eastern India
Get PDFThe geographical region which is called ‘India’s northeast’ is home to many tribes, ethnic groups, religions, cultures and languages. From the colonial times this place been seen as a ‘land frontier’ with resources that attracted many immigrant communities
Translation Impossible: : The Ethics, Politics and Pragmatics of Radical Translation in South Asian Literatures
Get PDFSince the growth of translation studies, translators and literary scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge the intense ethical and political, as well as practical, issues involved in preparing, producing and circulating translations of literature
Ghosts, Drunkards and Bad Language:: Translating the Margins of Nabarun Bhattacharya\u27s Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (‘The War Cry of the Beggars’)
Get PDFThis article unfolds some problematic aspects encountered during the translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya\u27s radical novel Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ (2003), published in Italian with the title Gli ammutinati di Calcutta (2016). I focus on the translation of the language of the margins, intended as social, ontological as well as linguistic spaces. The difficulty of translating into Italian the richness of Bengali slang in the semantic field of boozing offers an interesting case to reveal the strategies of a radical translation practice, which resists domestication (Venuti; Spivak) and endorses the unsettling use of sub-standard language(s) in order to translate the bizarre mutiny of Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ and the counter-language of its author
Blind Cat
Get PDFThere’s no way to know whether he was blind from birth or blindness was something he had picked up from his fights with other cats
Jaws of the Moon
No full textArka Chattopadhyay is an M.A, MPhil in English Literature, Jadavpur University, India. Having finished his MPHIL on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou, he is now pursuing his PHD at Writing and Society at University of Western Sydney on Samuel Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Uhlmann and Dr. Alex Ling. He has presented at conferences like 2010 and 2011 NEMLA Conventions, 2012 International Samuel Beckett Working Group and the 2014 Oxford Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies Symposium. His articles have been published in books, anthologies and journals like Miranda and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd\u27hui. He has edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature with James Martell, published by Roman Books, London in 2013. Along with Sourit Bhattacharya, he is the editor of the peer-reviewed online academic journal Sanglap. He has a chapter titled ‘“I switch off”: Towards a Beckettian Minority of Theatrical Event’, forthcoming in Palgrave MacMillan’s 2015 book Deleuze and Beckett edited by Stephen Wilmer et al
Decolonising the Archives: ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at the British Library
Get PDF‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at the British Library is a research and digitisation project in collaboration with the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR) at Jadavpur University, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and the SOAS Library in London. It is an extensive and rich repository of rare printed Bengali, Assamese and Sylheti books of which approximately 1800 titles have now been digitised and made available online. This international collaborative project has been running for nearly 5 years now with funding from the AHRC Newton-Bhabha Fund and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK. Focussing on early printed books between 1714 and 1914, the project’s key aims have been towards complementing digitisation and research with skills-sharing, capacity-building and working with Indian institutions (e.g., the National Library in Kolkata, Asiatic Society in Mumbai, and Jadavpur University). The Book Unbound, a book history symposium (2017) and two workshops on ‘Print and Islam in South Asia’ (2018) have been organised as part of the project, alongside the ongoing British Library South Asia Seminar Series which offers a research dissemination platform to doctoral students, early-career academics and senior scholars. In the current climate of continuing uncertainties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the online digital collection of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ has been a valuable resource for researchers who are unable to travel and access the physical collections at the British Library owing to intermittent lockdowns and restricted opening of the reading rooms. Through its research, cataloguing and digital humanities aspects, ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ has incorporated some vital aspects of decolonisation with respect to colonial archives
Democracy, Resistance, and the Practice of Literature:: Introduction
Get PDFRecent world politics has witnessed the rise of a certain style of authoritarianism. It can be roughly characterized with a cult of masculine leadership, a popular rhetoric of foreign investment and development, and a phobia of the illegal immigrant made into an ethical obligation. These contradictory forms of politics – the paean to multinational corporations, free trade, and the ‘bloc’-ing of power and the simultaneous mobilization of hyper-nationalism in the form of censoring books and throttling subversive aesthetic practices – characterize the conception and practice of what may be called “authoritarian democracy.” Considering the democratically elected basis of this authoritarianism, it becomes all the more important to ask if democracy paves the way for it. In that case, where do we locate democracy today? Is it right to say that the real democratic space unfolds itself in people’s movements and not in the electoral process? If this is the case, a radical conception of democracy would have to account for a shift of emphasis from the locus of governance to that of resistance and co-option. Historically speaking, democracy may not always be the means but it has been one of the ends for the various acts of resistance such as the working class, anti-colonial, nationalist, feminist, LGBT, or constitutional multiculturalism. In our sour and hungry times, when state aggression is overpowering the geographical marking (Russia’s in Ukraine or Israel’s in Palestine), or strangling the voice of internal resistance (North Eastern regions in India), not to mention religious fundamentalism, we need to rethink the old questions of democracy and resistance. With the ISIS, Boko Haram or the Taliban practice, we have seen how resistance itself can produce a dangerous authoritarianism which further complicates the relations between democracy, authoritarianism, and resistance. How do we historicize and ethically theorize resistance in relation to both democracy and an authoritarianism which borders on fascism