Author: David Shulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 383
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195652371
Description
The essays collected in this volume explore central problems found in Sanskrit literature and in the classical literatures of south India. The author offers an innovative approach to the latent poetics of medieval poetry in Tamil and in Telugu.
What is the nature of the poetic voice? What kind of experience is at stake? How does poetic language come to embody truth? How is this truth conceived by the poeticians and theoreticians who produced grammars of poetic perception and effect?
In this book, the author offers an innovative approach to the latent poetics of medieval poetry in Tamil and in Telugu, where the poet turns out to be very close to a magician or sorcerer, and the project of poetry is to induce or intensify the presence of God. Several essays deal with the theory of self and the organization of the internal world of imagination, forgetting, and memory in these classical literatures.
This book will be welcomed by scholars and specialists of medieval south Indian and Sanskrit literature.
Contents
Introduction
1. AUTHORITY, STRUCTURE, VOICE
Towards a Historical Poetics of the Sanskrit Epics
The Yaksa's Questions
Poets and Patrons in Tamil Literature and Literary Legend
From Author to Non-Author in Tamil Literary Legend
2 SELVES, MEMBERED AND REMEMBERED
On Being Human in the Sanskrit Epic: The Riddle of Nala
Embracing the Subject: Harsa's Play within a Play
The Prospects of Memory
Dreaming the Self in South India
3 METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE
Bhavabhuti on Cruelty and Compassion
Fire and Flood: The Testing of Sita in Kampan's Iramavataram
First Man, Forest Mother: Telugu Humanism in the Age of Krsnadevaraya
Does God Have Moods?