Politics and Letters:
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time in India
on
23, 24 January 2018
at
P.G. Department of English,
Utkal University,
Bhubaneswar,
Odisha, India
Concept Note
A great many
conferences and symposia are held on literature, on the various contemporary
extensions in which literary and visual culture exist today, namely Comparative
Literature, World Literature, Minority Literature, Digital Humanities and so
on. There are, however, very few conferences in which the crucial mediating
role of criticism is explored and debated, despite the significant reversal in
the literature-criticism relationship in the later decades of the last century.
Jonathan Culler alerted us to this reversal in a pithy formulation when he
said: “Earlier the history of criticism was a part of the history of
literature, but now it is the history of criticism which provides the framework
for reading and understanding literature.”
The shift that
Culler has described has no doubt given criticism a certain undeniable
pre-eminence in literary culture. In the academic setting, however, and
especially in the Indian context, this shift seems to have led to a ‘critical
supermarket’ (Fredric Jameson) of styles, an eclecticism of approaches to
literature. The pre-eminence of literature and the self-evidence of literary
value are still unchallenged. The globalization of culture, under the influence
of neoliberal economic policies, has become another name for the
commodification of culture. This coupled with the largely uncritical,
chauvinistic and anti-rational climate we are living in, not just in India but
in the ‘developed’ part of the world, makes it obligatory for us to pose afresh the question about ‘the function
of criticism at the present time. ’
While this
expression echoes Matthew Arnold, the function in question is a hermeneutic
one, voiced with considerable urgency by Oscar Wilde at the turn of the last
century. Wilde said that the highest critical function was ‘to reveal in the
Work of Art what the author had not put there.’ This sort of criticism is
hermeneutics at its best and involves reading the text against its grain.
Hermeneutics is the need of the hour.
And in this context it is important to recall another figure from the
later decades of the twentieth century, Pierre Macherey, who, though not much
talked about now, made the best possible case for a political hermeneutics with
his statement: ‘the task of criticism is to know the work as it cannot know
itself.’
The conference,
building on this case for a demystifying hermeneutics – Macherey’s project was
to demystify literature, will explore the ways in which the critique of
literary and cultural artefacts and discourses reveals/constitutes something
that the authors or the instigators did not consciously put there. This kind of
hermeneutic act that results in the production of an interpretation is
intimately connected to the context in which it is produced. Drawing on
literary, cultural and visual corpuses from around the world, but with a
particular focus on India, this conference will seek to reveal the ‘not-said’
of texts, the secret principle which ties ‘symbolic acts’ to the racial,
sexual, political and economic unconscious.
Within the overall
framework of the secular and political function of the critical act, the
conference will engage with and explore the following issues:
The politics of
literary representation
Literary study as
an exercise in ‘radical semiotics’ or the tracing of ‘politics’ in the ‘letter’
of the text
Translation as an
act of interpretation and (re)writing
Revisiting the
aesthetics and politics debates in Europe in the 1930s
Revisiting the
Marxism and Scrutiny debate in England in the 1930s
The realist canon
of Indian literature as radical intervention
Literary
radicalism in India in the 1940s
The role of
criticism when confronted with an explicitly political discourse (feminist,
dalit, minority texts etc.)
The ‘universals’
of radical criticism and the ‘particulars’ of place or locality
Class, gender,
race and sexuality: commonalities or forces pulling in different directions?
‘Universalism’
versus ‘nationalism’ and/or ‘nativism’
History and
politics: the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of all literature?
The politics of
modernist or exilic literature or the memoir
The politics of
postmodernism
Political
readings of culture (postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism etc.)
The conference invites
papers exploring one or more of the issues listed above in relation to
literary, cultural and cinematic texts of the last two hundred years. Critical
and metacritical readings of critics, seminal critical concepts and texts from
the West as well as from India will be on the agenda. Papers seeking to engage
with Indian aesthetics from a political standpoint are welcome.
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Robert Clark
Former Professor
of English and American Literature
University of
East Anglia, U.K.
&
Distinguished Editor in Chief, Literary Encyclopedia
Proposed Title of Talk:
“Jane Austen and the Transformation of Capital”
Plenary Speakers:
Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz
Honors College
Professor
University of
Maryland Baltimore Campus
Maryland, USA
Prof. Harish Trivedi
Former Professor
of English
University of
Delhi, India
Dr. Uday Kumar
Professor of
English
Centre for the
School of Languages
Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi
Prof. Paul St-Pierre
Adjunct Professor
of Linguistics and Translation
University of
Montreal, Canada
Dr. Mauricio D Aguilera Linde
Professor of
English
University of
Granada, Spain
Proposed Talk: “Gopinath
Mohanty: Towards a Materialist Reading”
Call for Papers – Guidelines
Registration is
compulsory for participation and presentation of the papers.
Participants are
requested to send their original and unpublished papers, strictly following the
MLA Style Book-7th Edition for preparing their papers.
Only selected
papers are eligible for presentation and publication.
In case of the
co-authored papers, both authors have to register and at least one of them
should be present in the conference.
Participants have
to make their own arrangements for their travel, stay and board.
The abstracts
written in 250-300 words with a paper title in the prescribed format
format-for-abstract should reach the following email ID: iccenglish.utkal@gmail.com
Each participant
will have 15 minutes presentation time. The word limit for the completed paper
is 2500-3000.
Registration Fee
Paper Presenters
(India) : INR 1700/-
Foreign
Participants/Paper Presenters : USD 100
For Utkal
University Scholars: INR 1000/-
Students of the
Department : INR 200/-
*Late
registration after due date: Rs. 500/25 USD for each participant along with the
above said fee.
*Registration fee
is to be paid through NEFT
Details of Bank
Account: will be uploaded later
Note:
Registration fee includes conference kit, certificate, working lunch and
refreshments on both days of the conference.
Venue/Contact
PG Department of
English
Utkal University,
Vani Vihar-751004
Phone No- 0674-
2567542
Conference
Director:
Prof. Himansu S
Mohapatra
heironymo@gmail.com
Cell phone- +91
9437404431
Department
Faculty:
Dr. Asim R Parhi
(Professor & Head)
Mr. Pulastya Jani
Ms. S. Deepika
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