Author: Brinda Bose
Editor: Brinda Bose
Publisher: Pencraft International
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 223
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185753520
Description
Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives presents a wide range of incisive scholarly criticism on the eminent Indian writer's work to date.
With an introduction that places Amitav Ghosh in the context of his historical / cultural / social / political times, this anthology brings together both established and new critics in their perceptive grasp of Ghosh's extraordinary oeuvre of fiction, starting from The Circle of Reason (1986) through The Shadow Lines (1988), In an Antique Land (1992) to the fairly recent The Glass Place (2000), along with a reading of Countdown (1999), Ghosh's best-known and most influential piece of political writing.
A greater emphasis is placed on The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land, which have received the widest critical attention and are, as yet, the Ghosh texts most taught in university courses across the world. An innovative pedagogy section in this collection also explores these texts from both teachers and students perspectives, as they play out in classrooms at locations as far apart as Delhi and the American mid-west.
An interview with Amitav Ghosh animates this anthology with an authorial intervention that - perhaps unwittingly - both validates and questions the praxis of literary criticism today in its peculiarly postmodern predicament.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
I INTRODUCTION
II CRITICAL READINGS
No Home But in Memory:
Migrant Bodies and Belongings, Globalization and
Nationalism in The Circle of Reason and the Shadow Lines
Re-Writing the World:
The Circle of Reason as the Beginning of the Quest
Suppressed Memory and Forgetting:
History and Nationalism in The Shadow Lines
Fictions of Nationhood in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
Between Myth and Ethnography:
An Anthropological Reading of In An Antique Land
Texts and Worlds in
In An Antique Land
When Speaking with Ghosts:
Spectral Ethics in the Calcutta Chromosome
In Time of the Breaking of Nations:
The Glass Palace As Postcolonial Narrative
Mimic Missions: A Critique of the Nuclear Arms Race in South Asia
III PEDAGOGY
Gender, Nation, History:
Some Observations on Teaching The Shadow Lines
The Problem of Chronology and the Narrative Principle in The Shadow Lines
A Student’s Colloquium on Studying The Shadow Lines
Refracted Light:
Teaching In An Antique Land
IV INTERVIEW
An Interview with Amitav Ghosh
Contributors