The Origins of Dislike

by Amit Chaudhuri

Overview

'Strategic thinking for a writer articulates itself as dislike and as allegiance.' In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions—that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading. Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192512604
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/20/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, the latest of which is Friend of My Youth. He is also a critic and a musician and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Origins of Dislike
The Piazza and the Car Park
Poetry as Polemic
Deprofessionalisation and Legitimacy
The Other Green
On the Gita: Krishna as Poetic Language
The Alien Face of Cosmopolitanism: An Indian Reading of Cynthia Ozick on the Woolfs
Qatrina and the Books: Nadeem Aslam and others
Ray and Ghatak and Other Filmmaking Pairs: The structure of Asian modernity
The Photographer as Onlooker
The Sideways Movement
Unconstitutional Spaces
Un-machinelike
Nissim Ezekiel: Poet of a Minor Literature
The Emergence of the Everyday: Kipling, Tagore and Indian Regional Writing
Possible, not Alternative, Histories
Starting From Scratch: Buddhadeva Bose and the English Language
On the Paragraph
'I am Ramu'

Editorial Reviews

05/07/2018
Literature professor and novelist Chaudhuri (Friend of My Youth) surveys a rich variety of artists, media, and ideas in this intriguing but uneven collection of previously published essays and lectures. Highly academic diction will dissuade most casual readers, which is a shame, because while Chaudhuri doesn’t succeed in tying the different entries together very strongly, his wide-ranging examinations prove worthy of the work they ask of the reader. Many of the pieces explore celebrated Indian artists, including photographer Raghubir Singh, filmmakers Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, and, in a number of essays, multidisciplinary Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Chaudhuri also touches on the novels of British author Henry Green, and on such general themes as the search for identity among Indian artists and the encroachment of market capitalism on the world of letters. Even as readers become accustomed to the complex and often discursive style, they will still find doorstop sentences like, “At this time, laughter emanates from Bakhtin too, with a specific political significance, a significance that immediately adheres to the ludic.” The author’s erudition cannot be doubted, but too often it obscures more than it explains. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"These essays testify to a formidable intelligence at work. Chaudhuri's engaging yet exacting reflections range widely across literature and the arts. Puncturing intellectual pieties and lazy thinking, they challenge us to rethink how art and the world connect." — Rita Felski, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English, University of Virginia

From the Publisher