Wednesday, 13 September 2017

PoCo Confy @ Utkal University, Odisha

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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