The Writer-Critic and Literary Studies: Mission Statement
Despite Socrates’s imputation that the great tragic poets didn’t know what they were up to and why they were up to it, writers and creative practitioners are often deeply self-reflexive
Despite Socrates’s imputation that the great tragic poets didn’t know what they were up to and why they were up to it, writers and creative practitioners are often deeply self-reflexive
As it’s being presented in partnership with the India International Centre, New Delhi, the Symposium is open to all, and you don’t need to register.
The conversation that took place between the academic and translator Jatin Nayak and Amit Chaudhuri at Ashoka University on 12th April 2023.
World literature. It is a weighty little term that has evolved with the times, outgrowing old meanings and acquiring new, contentious ones.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Kiran Nagarkar’s 1974 novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis – Seven Sixes are Forty-Three in the English translation – is a modernist collage: fragmentary, dream-like
In one of his poems, the Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla compares the flight of a bird to that of a butterfly
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,
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
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
'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.