WiSe 15/16: Asian Literary-Cultural Theories: A Survey
Gautam Chakrabarti
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"In a family where even the servants did not know how to speak the vernacular, Keshavdas became a slow-witted Hindi poet." (Kesavdas Misra, Kavipriya, 2.17, quot. Busch, Allison, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, New York: Oxford U P Inc., 2011, p. 23.)
The structural underpinnings of the proposed course, as implicit in the title, envisage a comparative consideration of the various well-established theoretical traditions of literary-cultural critique in Asia, especially in the Indian Subcontinent, Japan, China and the Middle East. Thereby, one hopes to be able to give a bird's eye-view, which might serve to acquaint the students, even if rudimentarily, with the mutually-reflexive and synergising discursive and analytical spaces within various Asian 'national' and transnational literary traditions and cultures, which are, when seen through 'Orientalist' prisms, often perceived to be in the 'receiving' mode, especially in the sphere of literary-cultural theorisation. After the socio-cultural and politico-economic upheavals and discoveries of early-modern Europe caused a noetic leap in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European national/imperial constellations established, with different degrees of success and longevity, their hegemonic political and cultural sway in large parts of the non-Europhone world. This led to not only the spatial expansion of Europhone societal and cultural normativities, but also to the crystallisation of various 'Western' constructions and understandings of 'Eastern' cultures. The aim of the present course is not, however, to critique the same-as, for example, undertaken by scholars of the postcolonial condition-but to engage with theoreticians and texts that seek to identify, categorise, strategise and explicate various aspects and goals of literary-cultural production, thereby, perhaps, configuring cultural entities as being more hybridised and polycentric than is generally assumed to be the case. We will be studying, within the domain of comparative literary theory, short excerpts from ten seminal Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi (Brajbhasa), Bangla, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and Japanese theoretical texts-in their English and/or German translations-which, between themselves, embody and investigate different exchanges and trade-offs between tradition and modernity in various Asian cultural contexts.
Key Texts and Contexts:Short selections (occasionally, even 3-4 pages) from the Tolappiyam (ca. 3rd century BCE-ca. 10th century CE), Bharata's Nayasastra (The Science of Dramaturgy) (ca. 200 BCE-ca. 200 CE), Anandavardhana's (820-90) Dhvanyaloka (The Illumination of Aesthetic Suggestion), Abhinavagupta's (ca. 950-ca. 1020) Abhinavabharati, Kesavdas Misra's (1555-1617) Kavipriya (Handbook for Poets, 1601), Bharatcandra Ray's {ca. 1705(-12)-60} Rasamañjari (The Spadix of Emotional-Aesthetic Essence), Abu Bakr 'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani's (ca. 1009/10-1078) Dala'il al-i'jaz (The Proofs of Inimitability), Ahmad ibn Umar ibn Ali, aka Nizami-i Aruzi-i Samarqandi's (fl. 1110-61) Chahar Maqala (Four Discourses), Liu Xie's (ca. 465-ca. 521) Wenxin Diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of the Dragon), and Motoori Norinaga's (1730-1801) Kojiki-den (Commentaries on the Kojiki). Students are advised not to worry if some of these texts are not readily-available: the Lecturer will make selections from them, as needed, available after the commencement of the course in October.
Course Language/Unterrichtssprache: English and German Desirable (but NOT mandatory) language proficiency: Level B1 and above, for English, of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Evaluation: Interactive participation in class-discussions, verbal presentations, the end-of-semester essay and regular attendance; the last-named will factor as a positive incentive, in terms of grade-weightage for regularity, and not in a punitive sense. Finis
close16 Class schedule
Additional appointments
Mon, 2016-02-08 18:00 - 20:00Regular appointments