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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Peter D. McDonald, a professor at Oxford University, has been turning, of late, into a 'person of letters'.
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...
My two-volume book, Europe: A Philosophical History (Routledge, 2021), explores the vicissitudes of the modern European idea of Europe’s exemplary modernity...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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’.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
