Posts in category: World Literature

Shamelessly borrowing a webpage from Cosma Shalizi’s books, here is an aggregate of my casual notes on some books casually read over the summer. I have been posting these on the federated book-reading site bookwyrm: you can fedi-follow me there from any-fediwhere as agoldst@bookwyrm.social, if that’s something you like to do (sickos).

Robert P. Goldman, ed., Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India

Over the last couple of years, I have been irregularly reading my way through the Princeton Library of Asian Translations edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. I just finished this seventh and final volume. I love a good philological extravaganza, and my one year of Sanskrit in college made me particularly enthusiastic about the ins and outs of that beautiful language. So this gigantic mega-edition, with tons and tons of paratext bulking out the 24,000-odd ślokas of the epic, had lots of appeal for me. I didn’t know much at all about the poem when I started. My single college course on Indian culture (beyond the Sanskrit) spent some time on the Mahābhārata but not on the Rāmāyaṇa. I had the vague idea that the latter is, Eurocentrically speaking, the Sanskrit Odyssey, which sounds cool, and I’d read A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” because I admire Ramanujan and because it was, sigh, in the news for a while. Ramanujan also makes it sound cool and supplies a stretch of quite beautiful translation (in collaboration with David Shulman) from Vālmīki’s version (alongside his renderings of other versions).

I recently picked up the first of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, Faceless Killers. I loved the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations of these mysteries but had been saving up the pleasure of the novels themselves. I have the special talent of forgetting the resolution of pretty much any mystery I read, so I have no trouble enjoying the suspense a second time around. What I do not enjoy, however, is reading an excellent novel in a poor text.

I’m attending the Society for Novel Studies conference in Pittsburgh this week. I’m on a panel organized by my colleague Rebecca Walkowitz on “Genre Fiction and World Literature,” with papers by Sarah Chihaya (Princeton), Jessica FitzPatrick (Pitt), and Philip Joseph (University of Colorado–Denver). The panel is in the D session, Saturday at 2:30 p.m. in Carnegie Room I-II.

My paper is called “Cosmopolitanism before and after the Omnivore,” and I’m going to argue that the rise of omnivorousness as a high-status disposition enables one kind of cosmopolitan science fiction—exemplified by Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome—while inviting us to forget the worldliness of lowlier forms dating back to the earliest pulps. Visualization:

Last year I participated in a symposium at the University of Utrecht on The Ethics of Autonomy. Many of the contributions to that symposium now appear in revised form in a special issue of the Journal of Dutch Literature, edited by the symposium organizers, Frans Ruiter and Wilbert Smulders. I contributed a response to the whole, Autonomy Proliferates. The issue is in English, but all the titles have Dutch versions as well, and I particularly appreciate the rather more poetic-sounding version of mine, “Autonomie bloeit.”

Most of the essays discuss the work of the Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans, a writer for whom literary autonomy was, as Ruiter and Smulders argue in their own contribution, a central concern. But the journal issue is really very wide-ranging, both in terms of approaches and in terms of the subject matter which the pretext of autonomy makes possible. A number of essays take up the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu: Ruiter and Smulders draw close parallels between Bourdieu and Hermans; Thomas Vaessens makes a provocative argument against accepting what he calls Bourdieu’s “faith in autonomy”; Laurens Ham complicates Bourdieu’s framework in his study of the continuing struggles over autonomy in contemporary Dutch literature from Multatuli to the present; and as for me, well—no surprises about my theoretical touchstones, if you know me for the fanboy I am.

That’s not to say that the contributors are all in lockstep. In addition to the controversy between Ruiter and Smulders and Vaessens about autonomy and responsibility, strikingly different views of autonomy emerge in the other essays, by Derek Attridge, Aukje van Rooden, Marc de Kesel, and Arnold Heumakers.

Hermans was a new writer for me and a great pleasure to explore, even if only in translation. His output is mostly unavailable in English; Ina Rilke has translated two of his novels, The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep. I glance at the latter in my contribution to the special issue. The JDL special issue also includes English translations of two short pieces of Hermans’s writing: a biting manifesto, “Unsympathetic Fictional Characters” (trans. I. Rilke), and an enigmatic early story, “An Emancipation” (trans. M. Hutchison).

[Edited 12/27/15: Ham’s essay, “The Specialism of Unspecificity,” is not only about contemporary writing—nor, of course, is Bourdieu his only theoretical interlocutor, any more than he is for any of the other scholars here.]

My essay on the sociology of G. V. Desani, “Hatterr Abroad: G. V. Desani on the Scene of World Literature,” is now out in Contemporary Literature (downloadable via JSTOR). I take the reception of Desani’s novel All About H. Hatterr as a demonstration of the divergences among readers in the system of “world literature,” a system structured by inequalities of symbolic power. The novel itself makes a theme of this disempowerment at the hands of cultural mediators—but Desani’s satire did not forestall readers in India, Britain, and the United States from appropriating his novel for their own purposes as a cornerstone of a properly “desi” Indian novel canon, a freakish feat of style, or an exemplar of global or international modernism. My account thus emphasizes a sociological interpretation of reception and mediation over the meanings one might discover through a “reading” of Hatterr.

I draw a cautionary lesson for modernist studies from my study of Desani’s reception: Desani, linked from the first with international high modernism, is always also read as inferior and belated by comparison to the axial figures of the Anglo-modernist canon to whom he is insistently compared. My prognosis for the field’s attempts to “expand” modernism is quite pessimistic; individual good intentions stand little chance in the face of the complicity, so clearly traced by Desani’s reception history, among the Eliot-Joyce canon, the uneven geographic distribution of symbolic power, and the reading protocols dictated by modernist aesthetics.

In true Hatterr-ly fashion, my material on Desani and his work insistently spilled over the bounds of the essay and its argument. The nice thing about a blog is that there’s somewhere to spill. So a couple of extra fragments.