Thinking Literature across Continents

Thinking Thinking Literature Across Continents Across Generations

“…I have a question for Ghosh, especially in the context of his discussion of the passage from Rabindranath Tagore's "Sadhana." 16 When we are in sahitya, with its notion of being together, who are we "with?" My answer, and Ghosh may want to correct me here with some asperity, is: we are with ourselves, in a heightened mode, in literature.…”

“…There, he qualifies his initial aims for the book and seems to settle for "stirring the pot," for the book's having allowed "things to grow in silence." 37 This is the history that Ghosh is writing about when he says that "the sociocultural displacement of a text in a classroom is a reality that the reading and experience of literature have to encounter." 40 It is a history of displacement and absence, but also one of enforced silences, muted tongues, imposed languages, foreign imaginaries, gate-kept canons, and fetishized pronunciations.…”

“…With Ghosh and Miller, whose first two chapters consider "the mattering of literature," Radha and I surely agree that literature does in fact matter? It matters especially as literature continues to transform, physically into e-texts and semantically as a "contribution to empirical knowledge about the social world" and is involved "in the formation of ethical norms" 12 ) and how (in Ghosh's words, through "a kind of withdrawal from its readers, a febrile anxiety to see itself exhausted at the hands of its readers" 13 )-as well as about the ways in which Ghosh-Miller pose and address these questions. And so we dialogue, seeking to be "exploratory and participatory," to engage "in an exchange that, while directed, is nevertheless relatively open-ended, unpredictable, vulnerable to contingency" 14 -at least until it is time to edit.…”