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Lecture by Dr. Sourav Kargupta on 07.12.2015
We cordially invite you to the lecture by Dr. Sourav Kargupta (School of Culture and Society - The Department for Indology, Aarhus University) entitled “From Non-Fictional to Fictional: Literary Non-Conscious, Sexual Difference and Rabindranath Tagore’s Trajectories”.
The talk will take place on Monday, 07.12.2015 at 2.00 p.m. c.t. in room 323.
The poster is available here.
Abstract:
From Non-Fictional to Fictional: Literary non-conscious, Sexual Difference and Rabindranath Tagore’s Trajectories.
This paper presents the initial findings of my project tentatively titled: “Literary non conscious and the history of the jati: Rabindranath Tagore’s Trajectories”. The project tries to take initial steps toward a re-statement in situating the works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in the map of the literary as well as the socio-political. It argues that Tagore’s writings on literature, especially his conceptual-speculative readings of ‘Bengali Folk Literature’ open up a major theoretical possibility in understanding the genealogy of the ‘nation’ in a non-essentialist way, a conceptual critique which subsequently is never explored. This paper would specifically argue that there is a possible way of reading a continuity between Tagore’s early prose ‘non-fiction’ on the question of the literary and his fictional works. Within its limits, it can only talk about the short stories, when talking about fictional works. The idea of the ‘concept-metaphor’ is key to the style-of-reading this project pursues. Any sign, within a textual situation has a dual trajectory. On the one side it is controlled within the limits of clear conceptual rigour, and, on the other, it remains open to a temptation of metaphoric slide of meaning. In balancing the two, the metaphoric remains regulated by a certain economy. The paper works with this assumption that if one carefully follows the economy of metaphoric deployments in a text (I am only talking about prose works here), one can recover a map both of the intentional archeology its author, and the typical resistances the subject-matter put up to the revealing glance of his prose. In the case of Tagore, the following of the metaphoric prohibitions and transgressions become more important, since (especially the early) Tagore is actively in the process of tasting the limits of Bengali prose in articulating different kinds of subjects and is very willing to give into the metaphoric plural slides of meaning. This paper discusses two such moments in early Tagore (before the turn of the century) where his experiments with the metaphoric reveals key ideas about a nonessential list philosophy. In the first moment, I try to show how, faced with the problem of the ‘literary on-conscious’, Tagore’s inclination towards metaphoric detours is strained, as the non-fictional is pushed to a more fictional loosening of meanings. In the second, the fictional itself encounters a limit in trying to stage an ethical transgression of the social by critiquing the foreclosure of ‘sexual difference’, and therefore of the metaphoric as such. This thread would be established with detailed analysis of some of Tagore’s short stories.
The talk will take place on Monday, 07.12.2015 at 2.00 p.m. c.t. in room 323.
The poster is available here.
Abstract:
From Non-Fictional to Fictional: Literary non-conscious, Sexual Difference and Rabindranath Tagore’s Trajectories.
This paper presents the initial findings of my project tentatively titled: “Literary non conscious and the history of the jati: Rabindranath Tagore’s Trajectories”. The project tries to take initial steps toward a re-statement in situating the works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in the map of the literary as well as the socio-political. It argues that Tagore’s writings on literature, especially his conceptual-speculative readings of ‘Bengali Folk Literature’ open up a major theoretical possibility in understanding the genealogy of the ‘nation’ in a non-essentialist way, a conceptual critique which subsequently is never explored. This paper would specifically argue that there is a possible way of reading a continuity between Tagore’s early prose ‘non-fiction’ on the question of the literary and his fictional works. Within its limits, it can only talk about the short stories, when talking about fictional works. The idea of the ‘concept-metaphor’ is key to the style-of-reading this project pursues. Any sign, within a textual situation has a dual trajectory. On the one side it is controlled within the limits of clear conceptual rigour, and, on the other, it remains open to a temptation of metaphoric slide of meaning. In balancing the two, the metaphoric remains regulated by a certain economy. The paper works with this assumption that if one carefully follows the economy of metaphoric deployments in a text (I am only talking about prose works here), one can recover a map both of the intentional archeology its author, and the typical resistances the subject-matter put up to the revealing glance of his prose. In the case of Tagore, the following of the metaphoric prohibitions and transgressions become more important, since (especially the early) Tagore is actively in the process of tasting the limits of Bengali prose in articulating different kinds of subjects and is very willing to give into the metaphoric plural slides of meaning. This paper discusses two such moments in early Tagore (before the turn of the century) where his experiments with the metaphoric reveals key ideas about a nonessential list philosophy. In the first moment, I try to show how, faced with the problem of the ‘literary on-conscious’, Tagore’s inclination towards metaphoric detours is strained, as the non-fictional is pushed to a more fictional loosening of meanings. In the second, the fictional itself encounters a limit in trying to stage an ethical transgression of the social by critiquing the foreclosure of ‘sexual difference’, and therefore of the metaphoric as such. This thread would be established with detailed analysis of some of Tagore’s short stories.
Posted on 01 Dec 2015
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