Literature and Life by Akhtar Husain Raipuri (original) (raw)
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World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/
World Literature as a Special Issue
Journal of World Literature 8.2, 2023
In India, as in other parts of the world, readers’ exposure to the world and to world literatures largely took place through the pages of magazines, via translations, reviews, snippets of information, survey articles, and so on. The 1950s to 1970s were the golden age of magazine publishing in Hindi. Several Hindi magazines devoted to the short story not only showcased new literary talent but also invested much effort in translating writings from foreign literatures and from other Indian languages. Competing Cold War efforts to promote literatures from their rival spheres of influence produced a profusion of literary translations in magazine and book form, on which enterprising Hindi editors freely drew. This essay focuses on the spectacular special issues curated by Kamleshwar for two Hindi story magazines to explore the nexus between the short story, the magazine, and the world.
06 - Indian Literature, Multiculturalism and Translation - Guru Charan Behera
Translation plays a significant role, explicit or implicit, deliberate or spontaneous in the interlingual, intercultural communication between the people of India, as well in the construction of multilingual, multicultural Indian Literature. It negotiates the power relations between various cultural formations and different linguistic mediums as a means of communication and as a language of translation, contributing to the egalitarian process by countering the hierarchical relationships between languages and cultures, reclaiming disappearing texts and cultures, and releasing knowledge from the control of a few. The paper addresses these complex interconnected issues of Indian Literature, multiculturalism and translation.
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2024
The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel, in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature, namely Victor Hugo's Les Misérables translated into Malayalam between 1925 and 1927 and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude translated in 1984. The translation of Hugo's novel energized the scene of Malayalam fiction by infusing new modes of representation and widening the intellectual horizons of writers in general, and novelists in particular. The echoes of Les Misérables could be heard in Malayalam fiction well into the 1950s. The struggles against colonial and feudal authorities in Kerala, provided a fertile context for the imaginative interpretation of Hugo's humanist vision. The paper illustrates this point through close readings of critical essays, autobiographical narratives and debates on the nature of translation. The fascination of Malayali readers with García Márquez has resulted in the translation of his entire corpus into Malayalam. Magic realism as pioneered by García Márquez liberated the Malayalam novelistic narrative from social realist and modernist dogmas. The colonial disruption of oral narratives, the consequent cultural amnesia and the struggle to reclaim one's forgotten past are themes that struck a chord in Malayalam writers of fiction. Through a detailed discussion of the novel, Moustache by S. Hareesh, the interface between novelistic discourse and world literature is mapped in the latter part of the essay.
English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India
English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India’s complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls “literary nationality.” Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways. Table of Contents Prologue: The Slush Pile 1 Reading Delhi and Beyond 2 Two Tales of a City 3 In Sujan Singh Park 4 The Two Brothers of Ansari Road 5 At the Sahitya Akademi 6 Across the Yamuna 7 “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience" 8 Indian Literature Abroad 9 Conclusion
POPULAR LITERATURE, TRANSLATION AND INTERROGATING POST-COLONIAL INDIA
IASET, 2013
This work is a perspectival analysis of translated popular literature in post-colonial India. Popular literature serves useful functions in that it seeks to fulfill an intellectual and cultural vacuum in the minds of a vast mass of our populace who seem to have barely benefited by the educational structure existing in the country. However, the past fifty years reveals unmistakable signs of a sense of inertia and casualness afflicting such author’s choice of works and the manner of presentation to the reading public. The object of this paper is to bring into analytical focus, the role, expanse and prospects of local Kannada writers like Bhairappa, Girish Karnad, etc. vis a vis the innumerable anonymous authors whose works infiltrate the streets. The authors discuss the poetic and politics of popular literature and the type of readership that patronizes it. The middle ground between these two categories of writers is occupied by the ‘elite’ literature of the Shobha De type, whose works have been canonized and yet which seems merely opportunistic.
The Rhetoric of Protest and Politics of Dissonance: A Comparative Study of Thangjam Ibopishak’s ‘‘I Want to be Killed By an Indian Bullet’’ and ‘‘Land of Half- Humans’’ and Muktibodh’s “Void” and “So Very Far” CHANDRA SHEKHAR DUBEY