Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis
The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times.

A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living.

Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis?

While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

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Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis
The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times.

A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living.

Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis?

While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

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Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis

Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis

by Prasanta Chakravarty
Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis

Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis

by Prasanta Chakravarty

Hardcover

$115.00 
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Overview

The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times.

A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living.

Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis?

While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9789354359927
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 09/30/2023
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.85(h) x 1.35(d)

About the Author

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi and the editor of the web-journal humanitiesunderground.org. His most recent work is Time, Doubt and the Wonder in the Humanities: Between the Tick and the Tock (2019). His other works include The Opulence of Existence, Essays on Aesthetics and Politics (2016); Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (2006) which deals with early modern radical culture and an edited volume on contemporary writings on humanities titled Shrapnel Minima, Writings from Humanities Underground (2014). Chakravarty nurtures a particular interest in poetry and poetics and enjoys translating significant contemporary literary writings into English.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Prasanta Chakrabarty
I. Lineages of the Self
The Formation and Transformation of the Self in Ancient Greek Political Discourse: Vijay Tankha
Aesthetic Repose (Visranti), Self and the Emerging Figure of the Rasika in Early Medieval India: Parul Dave Mukherji
II. Self in Crisis
A Difficult Freedom: Democracy, Disappointment, and the Indefatigable: Aishwary Kumar
Crisis and the Uncanny: N.A. Jacob
Catastrophe and the Lyrical Self: Prasanta Chakravarty
III. Aesthetics of the Self
Animamnemo: Sovereignty of the Self and the Mnemocultures of Individuation:D. Venkat Rao
Subjects Nature Divination: Rimli Bhattacharya
The Sensing Self: The Adventitious Roots of Aesthetic Sovereignty:Rahul Govind
IV. Self in Practice
Dialectics of Transcendental and Embodied Self:Andrei Tarkovsky's Image Motif in Context: Babu Thaliath
The Lost Object: Truth in Autobiography: Rachit Anand
The Möbius strip of Literature and Criticism: Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak: Anirudh Karnick

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