Why World Literature: Introductory Dialogues

  • Sourit Bhattacharya University of Glasgow
  • Arka Chattopadhyay IIT, Gandhinagar
Keywords: World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Globalisation, Diaspora

Abstract

In this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that scholars expressed such intense engagement with the issue. A number of journal special issues, anthologies, monographs, conferences, and symposia were published which widened and complicated the use of the term. Alongside the definitive volumes of David Damrosch’s What is World Literature (2003) and How to Read World Literature (2009), which have variously focussed on the issue of translation, there have been more critical interventions regarding methodology and employment of the term, notably by Emily Apter who has questioned the possibility of communication and meaning-making through translation, by Pascale Casanova who has pointed out the importance of world publication circuits and cultural capital, by Francesca Orsini who has highlighted the question of significant geographies as opposed to marginal geographies shaping literary imagination and form, and by Franco Moretti and the Warwick Research Collective who have attempted to politicise the category of world literature through a world-systemic reading.

Author Biographies

Sourit Bhattacharya, University of Glasgow

Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was formerly Assistant Professor of English at IIT Roorkee. Sourit received his BA and MA degrees in English literature from Calcutta (Presidency College) and Jadavpur universities, and an MPhil degree in Social Sciences from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. For his PhD degree in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick (2017), Sourit wrote a thesis on literary writings of the 1943 Bengal famine, the Naxalite movement, and the Emergency. A book based on the thesis is forthcoming from Palgrave. He is currently involved in two other books: a monograph on global postcolonial literature today (Orient BlackSwan) and an edited volume on the radical Bengali writer, Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury). His works have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Ariel, Textual Practice, Irish University Review, Interventions, and in edited volumes including The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (Palgrave, 2018), Cambridge Critical Concepts: Magical Realism (Cambridge Up, 2019), etc. Sourit's areas of interest include postcolonial and world literatures, environmental humanities, global realism, materialist aesthetics, and translations studies.

Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT, Gandhinagar

Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor of literary studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a B.A., M.A., MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He has written his MPhil thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou and finished his PhD from Western Sydney University on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Arka has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett and journals like Miranda, Textual Practice, S, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Harold Pinter Review, Language and Psychoanalysis.  He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature and a Bengali critical compendium on the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya. Arka is the chief editor of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap-journal.in/). He has guest-edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real is published by Bloomsbury in December, 2018. He is currently co-editing a volume of essays on and translations of Nabarun Bhattacharya, contracted by Bloomsbury for 2020.

Published
2017-09-30
How to Cite
Bhattacharya, S., & Chattopadhyay, A. (2017). Why World Literature: Introductory Dialogues. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 4(1), 01-08. Retrieved from http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/49
Issue
Vol 4 No 1 (2017): Why World Literature
Section
Articles

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