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SYMPOSIUM 4 : AGAINST STORYTELLING

Against Storytelling: Mission Statement

Against Storytelling: Mission Statement

About a decade ago, I interrupted a talk I was giving to a small group of international writers and academics gathered in Delhi to say, ‘Fuck storytelling.

Lyric Embarrassment: Or, Why I Can’t Tell a Story

Lyric Embarrassment: Or, Why I Can’t Tell a Story

When I first received Amit’s concept note for the symposium with its opening provocation, ‘Fuck storytelling!’ I felt a little pop of relief in my chest, and in the parts of me

UP Against Storytelling, for David Antin

UP Against Storytelling, for David Antin

In the aftermath of popular-vote loser Trump’s election, the search for blame began. On some accounts, the blame laid on postmodernists and poststructuralists who had so undermined

Storytelling and Forgetfulness

Storytelling and Forgetfulness

Years ago, I began to run into the claim that we are all storytellers. Storytelling was evidently a primal communal function for humanity. I was assured that we’ve been telling each other

Fabricating Texts for Theatre from a Tribal village in Bengal

Fabricating Texts for Theatre from a Tribal village in Bengal

Imagine a street, or better still – this one being less than four metres wide – imagine a narrow road made of hard-packed reddish soil stretched over about a kilometre

Journalism and the Triumph of the Story: A Personal ‘Narrative’

Journalism and the Triumph of the Story: A Personal ‘Narrative’

When I started out as a journalist, I had the makings of a very poor one. The pieces I turned in didn’t tell proper stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I guess – thinking back – they were light on information

“What Difference Does It make?” For and Against Storytelling via the Novels of Kiran Nagarkar

“What Difference Does It make?” For and Against Storytelling via the Novels of Kiran Nagarkar

Kiran Nagarkar’s 1974 novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis – Seven Sixes are Forty-Three in the English translation – is a modernist collage: fragmentary, dream-like

I Don’t Have Wings: Vinod Kumar Shukla

I Don’t Have Wings: Vinod Kumar Shukla

In one of his poems, the Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla compares the flight of a bird to that of a butterfly

A Story In Memory of John Ashbery

A Story In Memory of John Ashbery

All life Is as a tale told to one in a dream In tones never totally audible Or understandable, and one wakes Wishing to hear more,

Beyond the Tangible

Beyond the Tangible

These images are from the prologue of Anhey Ghorey Da Daan, or Alms For the Blind Horse, a film dealing with the angst, alienation and exploitation of the marginalised castes in Punjab

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

World literature. It is a weighty little term that has evolved with the times, outgrowing old meanings and acquiring new, contentious ones.

Terminal (1992)

Terminal (1992)

She did not say anything, but he always knew when she had drifted away from him. He shook her by her shoulder. ‘Are you angry?’ She let herself be shaken like a wax doll.

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

Looking at him from a distance, it was impossible to think that he wasn’t looking at us—wasn’t looking at anyone—that he was walking alone in his darkness.

Magazine: New Writing

Elena Lombardi on <em>Ulysses</em>, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

Elena Lombardi on Ulysses, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

In the second interview in the series, 'Interviews on Site', Elena Lombardi speaks about buying two copies of Ulysses (the second one was bought at Blackwell's) and her Odyssean journey

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

'Interviews on Site' is a new series of video interviews done for this website. The aim is to record a conversation at a location that is in some way related to the conversation.

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

World literature. It is a weighty little term that has evolved with the times, outgrowing old meanings and acquiring new, contentious ones.

Terminal (1992)

Terminal (1992)

She did not say anything, but he always knew when she had drifted away from him. He shook her by her shoulder. ‘Are you angry?’ She let herself be shaken like a wax doll.

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

Looking at him from a distance, it was impossible to think that he wasn’t looking at us—wasn’t looking at anyone—that he was walking alone in his darkness.

New

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

World literature. It is a weighty little term that has evolved with the times, outgrowing old meanings and acquiring new, contentious ones.

Terminal (1992)

Terminal (1992)

She did not say anything, but he always knew when she had drifted away from him. He shook her by her shoulder. ‘Are you angry?’ She let herself be shaken like a wax doll.

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

Looking at him from a distance, it was impossible to think that he wasn’t looking at us—wasn’t looking at anyone—that he was walking alone in his darkness.

Independence day special

independence day

Book of Lahore

Book of Lahore

I had always known of 11Temple Road. My mother, who was the eldest of Daddyji’s seven children, never spoke about it, never described it, and I never asked.

Ghazal

Ghazal

Tausif Alam's four-line ghazal came to the attention of people in Calcutta when he recited it during the Eid celebrations in May this year.

Reading Letters

Reading Letters

Peter D. McDonald, a professor at Oxford University, has been turning, of late, into a 'person of letters'.

SYMPOSIUM 3 : REASSESSMENTS

Symposium 2 : Deprofessionalisation

Symposium 1 : Literary Activism

Reassessments: Mission Statement

Reassessments: Mission Statement

Literary and intellectual history is neither an evolution nor a linear movement. It’s a narrative of stops and starts, mainly because it’s shaped by, and dependent on...

Beyond Eurocentrism and Anti-Eurocentrism

Beyond Eurocentrism and Anti-Eurocentrism

My two-volume book, Europe: A Philosophical History (Routledge, 2021), explores the vicissitudes of the modern European idea of Europe’s exemplary modernity...

<em>Madame Bovary</em> and the Impossibility of Re-reading

Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading

The first time I read Madame Bovary I was fourteen or fifteen. My family lived in England; at school I was learning French. Denise King, my French teacher, lent me her copy of the book...

Reshma Aquil of Daryabad

Reshma Aquil of Daryabad

There are, in India, two kinds of criticism. The first kind is criticism as unconsidered praise, in which the writer, having done little more than give documentary confirmation...

A Perpetual Problem

A Perpetual Problem

I was at the Museum of Modern Art, looking at their Surrealism collection. I'm not sure how long it took me to notice there were no women in it...

Academic Dreaming

Academic Dreaming

I have lived my life half in this world, half out of it. Hours, weeks, by now it must be years, have been spent in imagined elsewheres. Sometimes these other worlds have been invented by me—although 'invented' seems too deliberate a word. I daydream.

<em>Until the Lions</em>: Of Myths and Men

Until the Lions: Of Myths and Men

When I was nine, my father overheard me bragging to friends, children of his colleagues in the army. Though he had not been injured in battle, he had fought in all three wars India had waged in the 1960s and 70s

The Treacherous Modern

The Treacherous Modern

Must the earliest experience of artistic representation be such a menagerie of the senses? “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.”

Possible, not Alternative, Histories

Possible, not Alternative, Histories

I’m looking back at the title to remind myself of what it is. ‘Possible, not Alternative, Histories’. I want to do something here that’s reckless because it’s very ambitious.

Mission Statement

Mission Statement

From the mid-1990s onwards, we witnessed a convergence between literary language and the language of publishing, for it was publishers, increasingly, who told us about the ‘masterpieces’ they were publishing (the word, like the literary itself, had by then been disowned by most literature departments).

What about Criticism?

What about Criticism?

In his mission statement, Amit Chaudhuri identifies what he calls ‘market activism’ primarily with publishers and literary agents, or, perhaps more specifically, with the large publishing corporations and ‘super-agents’ who began to reshape the literary world during the early 1990s. But he also looks briefly askance at universities in order to point out an implicitly fatal coincidence.

Translation as Literary Activism

Translation as Literary Activism

I would like to evoke the extraordinary work, life, and career of the bilingual English-Marathi poet Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004) and of his generation of poets, writers, publishers, and artists who started producing their work in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in Bombay, and which I designate here as the little magazine ‘conspiracy’.

The Piazza and the Car Park

The Piazza and the Car Park

It was 1989. I was a graduate student at Oxford. I had made little progress with my doctoral dissertation and I had written a novel that had almost, but not quite, found a publisher. One of the routes that had taken me in my fiction towards Calcutta was Irish literature – its provincialism and cosmopolitanism, its eccentricity and refinement.

The Critic as Lover

The Critic as Lover

Many years ago – in the days before email – I found myself engaged in correspondence with the postcolonial critic Benita Parry. She had visited Rutgers University, where I was teaching, and had given a paper on the fiction of J.M. Coetzee, in which I too had an interest. We had a friendly disagreement about the question of silence in Coetzee’s novels...

Market Activism: A Publisher’s Perspective

Market Activism: A Publisher’s Perspective

I am a market activist. I make no apology for that – though I may apologise for some of the unintended consequences of my activity. I’ve worked in publishing all my adult life and, for the past fifteen years or so, have managed independent publishing companies that have – to a greater or lesser extent – been engaged in the pursuit of trying to make a business out of literary activity. In this respect, I think, I am perhaps an outsider at this symposium.

Magazine: New Writing

Elena Lombardi on <em>Ulysses</em>, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

Elena Lombardi on Ulysses, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

In the second interview in the series, 'Interviews on Site', Elena Lombardi speaks about buying two copies of Ulysses (the second one was bought at Blackwell's) and her Odyssean journey

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

'Interviews on Site' is a new series of video interviews done for this website. The aim is to record a conversation at a location that is in some way related to the conversation.

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma

World literature. It is a weighty little term that has evolved with the times, outgrowing old meanings and acquiring new, contentious ones.

Terminal (1992)

Terminal (1992)

She did not say anything, but he always knew when she had drifted away from him. He shook her by her shoulder. ‘Are you angry?’ She let herself be shaken like a wax doll.

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

‘I am lost somewhere’: Borges in London

Looking at him from a distance, it was impossible to think that he wasn’t looking at us—wasn’t looking at anyone—that he was walking alone in his darkness.

Elena Lombardi on <em>Ulysses</em>, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

Elena Lombardi on Ulysses, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford

In the second interview in the series, 'Interviews on Site', Elena Lombardi speaks about buying two copies of Ulysses (the second one was bought at Blackwell's) and her Odyssean journey

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Conversation with Charles Bernstein at, and on, the Museum of Modern Art, New York

'Interviews on Site' is a new series of video interviews done for this website. The aim is to record a conversation at a location that is in some way related to the conversation.

Book of Lahore

Book of Lahore

I had always known of 11Temple Road. My mother, who was the eldest of Daddyji’s seven children, never spoke about it, never described it, and I never asked.

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