Postcolonial Studies and the Literary

Shashi Deshpande's persistent realism has gone largely unmarked in the scholarship on her work and yet provides an important example of the ways in which the Indian novel in English has continued to rewrite, rework, and yet ultimately keep up a dominant realist capacity. Reading her 1996 novel, A Matter of Time, I argue that Deshpande explicitly rejects a modernist and postcolonial aesthetic in favour of a pedestrian and decidedly conventional realism. In so doing, Deshpande favours the social over the metaphysical as the location of meaning, reanimating realism as an internal communal process of social and cultural inquiry. Reality, the novel seems to offer through its realism, is found not by a search for absent meaning or metaphysical depth, but by recognizing it in its shared social surface and conventional presence.

Section: Part Iii: Deshpande’s Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“By its very presence”: Conventionality and commonality in Shashi Deshpande’s realism

Ben-Yishai

2015

“…Implicit in the choice of this German genre is the role of the aesthetic in our understanding of the postcolonial and its mediating power, especially the power and legacy of the European novel. However, the aesthetics of the form, and engagement with it, are being devalued because of readings of texts primarily as a "legitimizing device" (Sorensen, 2010: xi) for the representation of minority experiences and the politics of resistance. The result, as Eli Park Sorensen argues in Postcolonial Studies and the Literary (2010), is a corresponding devaluation of serious engagement with the literary, which in turn has created "an emergent sense of 'melancholia' in the field" (2010: xi).…”

Section: Postcolonial Melancholia and The Spectre Of Shamementioning

confidence: 99%

Postcolonialism 2010–2014

Mishra

2015

The idea of postcolonialism as signifying a break from the past, as the sign of the new, as a critical reappraisal in the context of imperialism and the rise of capital, and as a register of social and political assertiveness took shape as major geo-political changes were underway (the Iranian Revolution, the gradual decline of the Soviet Union, and so on). However, by 2006 when the word finally entered the OED, the citation and the definition embedded in it captured an important shift: "postcolonialism" as a proactive cultural logic aimed at the creation of an intentional object. The critical survey undertaken here suggests that the discourse of postcolonialism is now an intentional discourse with specific affects. These affects, as seen in the Anglophone bibliography on the subject of these past five years, may now be examined with reference to subjects and themes as varied as melancholia, shame, the horrors of poststructuralism, creolization, the vernacular, the cosmopolitan turn, the postcolonial "jew", the subaltern challenge, global warming, world-literary systems, traumatized bodies, among others.

“…Neither are we repeating Eli Sorensen's (2010) recent call to revive the category of the "literary" within postcolonial studies, which, he explains, requires a robust resuscitation of form. 6 Nor are we reiterating the oft-made demand to read closely.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…To be very clear, ours is not another version of the demand that works be "situated" in their historical contexts, interpreted against the background of myriad events, details, and personalities. Neither are we repeating Eli Sorensen's (2010) recent call to revive the category of the "literary" within postcolonial studies, which, he explains, requires a robust resuscitation of form. 6 Nor are we reiterating the oft-made demand to read closely.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

Field, material, technique: On renewing postcolonial literary criticism

Etherington

Zimbler

2014

Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthesizes insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno; particularly their respective notions of field and material. Then, in two short studies, on the critical reception of Louise Bennett in the Caribbean and J. M. Coetzee in South Africa, these concepts are put into motion to illuminate the truth-content of field-defining developments of the literary material.