Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Book Review:: Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal
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We’re the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to make sure that they don’t have an opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments
The Chronicler of “Ordinary Grief”:: Arun Kolatkar and the Songs of Insignificance
Get PDFLaetitia Zecchini’s Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014) is a decisive work on the precepts of modernism in India as it panned out around the aesthetic praxis of Kolatkar and his contemporaries against the cosmopolitan cultural background of Bombay (the present-day Mumbai) in the post-independence era. Primarily known as a poet in the pan-Indian literary scene, this book introduces Kolatkar as a man of many talents
What Cities Enclose:: A Geoliterary Approach to World Literature
Get PDFAfter its reappearance on the literary scope, world literature has become such an inevitable paradigm in contemporary reflections, that, as expressed by Theo D’Haen (2012), “no other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium”. Paradoxically, this has also caused an entrance into an ongoing cycle of metadiscursive reformulation, which has distanced the concept from its own definition, methodology and boundaries. Towards grasping world literature spectrum, the present proposal encompasses certain theoretical notions around 21st-century literature, by following the representation of urban space in The Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk) and Jerusalém (Gonçalo M. Tavares) as samples for contemporary concerns seen from a geoliterary angl
The monad and the cut in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
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Interruptions and false starts are omnipresent in Beckett’s work, revealing a similar preoccupation with the cut in psychoanalysis. And yet, Endgame would seem to present a situation devoid of a structuring cut, with its characters lodged in a form of uniform monad devoid of any opening to the outside: it appears as a desperately homogenous world, belonging to the imaginary register, one that dissimulates real anxiety. One major cut is therefore the exclusion of the characters from the phallic register, supportive of desire. While the refuge is a place of stasis, the cut intervenes in the come and go movement leaning on the symbolic register, driving the movement to go on. Clov’s tormented relationship to Hamm can be seen as exemplifying the formula of the fantasy, involving the cut between subject and a object, where any complementarity dissimulates a fundamental breach. Such an object is embodied by the other characters, as well as by the refuge itself. Finally, the cut is associated with the subject and discourse as a closed structure. However, the question could also be seen from the point of view of the use of lalangue, which informs the real dimension of saying
Environment From a Humanities Perspective:: Introductory Thoughts
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In the last decades, there has begun a close and productive dialogue between humanities studies and environment and disaster studies. This has arisen from the general understanding in academic and policy-making circles that the problem of environmental crisis or of climate change cannot be meaningfully engaged with through the lens of one single discipline or for that matter through scientific studies alone
Thinking across Time, Genre and Culture:: Theorizing the Superhero in a “More than Global” World
Get PDFIn this essay, I have tried to read the concept of the superhero through Ranjan Ghosh’s idea of “intra-active transculturality” inside a “more than global world” which accentuates on the transnational, translingual and transcultural circulation and engagement with a literary work. Philosophically, the concept of the “superhero’’ is linked to the active potentiality of Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”; and etymologically, it is linked to the grandeur of the mythical “hero.” However, this comic-book concept has been imprisoned into an insular identity within a self-inclusive genre since the birth of Superman in 1938. Over the years the concept of the superhero has travelled across times, places and genres. It has also been culturally translated and reformulated in many unpredictable contexts. The dialogue between the superhero and its “apocryphal” usages, the essay argues, adds an excess or “more” to it, and eventually creates the possibility of a new sense or a defamiliarised understanding of the concept. However, this essay is not an attempt to dismantle this popular cultural concept, but to revive its creative energy from the clutches of a globalised culture industry. The superhero, this essay argues, does not only belong to the comic-books and movies, but is embedded in a network of intra-relations within a larger literary and philosophical culture
Transferability of Academic English Skills to Discipline Courses:: A Survey-Based Study in the Indian Context
Get PDFThis study investigates student perceptions of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course, offered in first year of undergraduate studies at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD).Specifically the study focuses on the transferability of academic English skills to the study of core discipline subjects. It also examines the role of administering a proficiency test in the beginning of the semester for proficiency wise groupings of students. This study is based on a survey of 200 undergraduate students who have studied the EAP course and presently enrolled in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth semesters. The study explores students\u27 perceptions of the relationship between the academic English instruction in EAP classes and the actual tasks they found in courses across the disciplines through a survey questionnaire, recorded interviews and formal and informal discussions over one semester. 20 faculty members were interviewed to validate the perceptions of the students. The results of the survey and interviews indicate that students found EAP skills relevant in dealing with the demands of other content courses. These skills ranged from generating, analysing and synthesising ideas, drafting, revising and editing, presenting content in written and oral form and other academic skills
Strategies for Translating Obscenity: : Medical Language and Sanitization in Malay Rāychoudhurī’s Poetry
Get PDFThe Bengali ‘obscene’ (aślīl) poetry of the Hungry Generation is heavily pregnant with ‘dirty’ sexual imagery. In particular, the poem “Prachanda Baidyutik Chutar” and its English translation “Stark Electric Jesus” (1964) by the Hungryalist Malay Raychoudhuri concern the description of the female ‘sexual body’, male masturbation and bodily fluids. The use of a Bengali ‘medical’ vocabulary for portraying the ‘sexual body’ achieves a double operation of ‘sanitization’ of the semantic sphere of sex, unsuitable subject of poetry, and of ‘ironic inversion’ where the low dirty content embodied by masturbation and sexual activity attains the higher status of poetry, while downplaying the overtly mechanical Bengali lexicon of medical sciences. My attempt at re-translating some controversial passages of this poem helps laying out some methodological principles for developing a ‘contextual’ practice of translation in resistance to traditional notions such as accuracy and faithfulness
I don’t need to fear, do I?
Get PDFBiren was one of those people, you come across or talk to almost every day and then forget immediately afterwards