Reading Literature Today

Two Complementary Essays and a Conversation
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-81-321-0688-3
Verlag: Sage Publications India

Buch, Englisch, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 252 g

Reading Literature Today is a path-breaking intervention in current debates on reading and literature. This is a book of criticism that attempts to rescue literature from both the materialism of the market and the convoluted dryness of academia.
The two complementary essays-one on literature and the other on reading-focus largely on texts in English and French, but also refer to other literatures. The authors propose a way of reading literature that not only synthesises some earlier tendencies and puts them in context, but also propounds a revolutionary understanding of the nature of literature and reading.
The writers taken up for discussion include William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, Attia Hosain, Albert Wendt, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Mohsin Hamid and many others.
Written in the great and dying tradition of literary essays on literature and criticism, this is a bold and ground-breaking book by two exciting writers who believe in reading literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khair, Tabish

Doubinsky, Sebastien

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

I: LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE: AN ESSAY ON SILENCES AND GAPS - Tabish Khair
Preface
The Death of the Reader of Gaps and Silences
What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said
The Fissured Surface of Literature
What is Written and What is Not Written
II: `IN THE MIND OF THE BOURGEOIS READER`: AN ESSAY ON READING AS AN UNCOMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE (TRANSLATED PARTLY FROM FRENCH - Sebastien Doubinsky
Preface
Impermanence and Deception
Readers and Readers
Identification and Adherence
Reading the Unreadable
Last Words
III: A DISCUSSION OF REALISM, MAGIC REALISM, CONSUMERISM, PUBLISHING, READING AND WRITING - Sebastien Doubinsky and Tabish Khair
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Khair, Tabish
Tabish Khair is a poet, journalist, critic, educator and novelist. Shortlisted for the Encore Prize and the Crossword Award and winner of the All India Poetry Prize, he has been awarded academic fellowships and scholarships at various universities, including Copenhagen University, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi University and the University of Cambridge.

After about four years as a staff reporter in Delhi, Khair left for Copenhagen, Denmark, to do a PhD, which he completed in 2000. It was published as Babu Fictions and has since become one of the important secondary texts on Indian English fiction. In 2000, Khair also published a collection of poems, ‘Where Parallel Lines Meet’ (Penguin), which is considered to be “one of the most significant collections in recent years by an Indian writing in English.” It included poems for which he had won the prestigious All India Poetry Prize.

Khair’s second novel The Bus Stopped was shortlisted for the Encore Award and his new novel, The Thing about Thugs has been shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Prize. His other publications include the co-edited anthology, Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2006) and the study, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009).

Doubinsky, Sebastien
Sébastien Doubinsky was born in Paris in 1963. Having spent a part of his early childhood in America, he is completely bilingual and writes both in English and French. An established writer in France, Sébastien Doubinsky has published more than 12 novels, covering different genres, from classical literature to crime fiction. He currently lives in Aarhus, Denmark, with his wife and his two children, where he teaches French literature at the Aarhus University. Two of his recent novels are The Babylonian Trilogy (2009) and Quién es? (2010).