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Literary canons have real-world effects â they steal limelight from everyone else. We can challenge them by drawing attention to how they work
If we donât challenge literary canons, people can be left with only a narrow understanding of cultures, New Zealand academic Alice Te Punga Somerville argues. Photograph: Grant Maiden
If we donât challenge literary canons, people can be left with only a narrow understanding of cultures, New Zealand academic Alice Te Punga Somerville argues. Photograph: Grant Maiden
Sat 13 Feb 2021 14.00 EST
Last modified on Sat 13 Feb 2021 16.36 EST
I feel sheepish to admit how deeply affected I was when I encountered the research of Gauri Viswanathan, a professor in English at Columbia University in New York City. In Masks of Conquest: Literary study and British rule in India, she traces the history of English back to when it was first systematically taught as a secular discipline. I ask my students:
Traversing the overlapping print worlds of Portuguese, Konkani and English, Rochelle Pinto has been studying how colonialism and its aftermath has shaped life in Goa and the larger Goan diaspora in Mumbai and beyond. In this interview with Murali Ranganathan, she looks back at her engagement with print history and its connection with politics and land
At what point of time in your career did you realize that you had evolved into a book/print historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen?
A Master’s degree at JNU opened up a world of different methodologies thanks to an extraordinary range of teachers who introduced us to nineteenth century writing in India and to theoretical questions about the history of literary studies both in England and in India. This led to questions about how the field of literature was shaped during colonial rule and after, and about the assumptions that underlay our use of the category literature. Amo
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: The Ustad Who Could Catch the Bustle in A Flowerâs Scent
The acclaimed Urdu critic, poet and prose master changed the face of Urdu but also what it meant to engage with the literary in all its shapes, glorious or unsightly. Life after him means living with a slew of unfinished conversations, writes Geeta Patel.Â
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (September 30, 1935 â December 25, 2020) Photo: Aashima
The language of flowers (in homage to Ghalib and Faruqi)
You happen upon them
Lotus midnight hands over your soul
Petalled rose harkens loveâs slow fall
Tulip stillness as the heartâs quarry
Much has changed in the fantasy genre in recent decades, but the word ‘fantasy’ still conjures images of dragons, castles, sword-wielding heroes and premodern wildernesses brimming with magic. Major media phenomena such as
Harry Potter and
Game of Thrones have helped to make medievalist fantasy mainstream, and if you look in the kids’ section of nearly any kind of store today you’ll see sanitised versions of the magical Middle Ages packaged for youth of every age. How did fantasy set in pseudo-medieval, roughly British worlds achieve such a cultural status? Ironically, the modern form of this wildly popular genre, so often associated with escapism and childishness, took root in one of the most elite spaces in the academic world.