seem to be available online.
'In an antique land' by Amitav Ghosh and a long meditation on the first four novels of Amitav Ghosh by Jesper Hansen
'Language of Gods in the World of Men' by Sheldon Pollock and an article by the same author 'Crisis in the Classics'. Check also https://archive.org/details/LanguageOfTheGodsInTheWorldOfMen
P.S. I had doubts about fictionalized version of history in Amitav Ghosh novels. But I did not realize that Ghost started in the subaltern group and one part of 'In an antique land' first appeared there. Jesper Hansen explains
"Ghosh’s argument here is in line with the one presented by the Subaltern Studies Group and also by Spivak. Power and the making of history - even the act of writing itself - are closely intertwined, and in the novel they are closely associated with the elite (wazirs, sultans, etc.). Thus Ghosh does not have direct access to Bomma and his life; rather he has access to Ben Yiju, so Bomma’s consciousnessmbecomes what Spivak calls a “negative consciousness”: a consciousness created by a (deconstructive) interpretation of the letters of the Geniza in which they were originally found. One of the questions is thus how much interpretation - and implicit in this question how much deviation from the verifiable “truth” - should be allowed. Ghosh’s answer to the question is definitely that fiction should be
allowed to see the possibilities in the facts rather than let the facts limit the fiction, which is also suggested by Claire Chambers’ argument that Ghosh is committed
“to the view that fiction is as valid a way of explaining events as the more
prestigious authority of scientific reason.” "
'In an antique land' by Amitav Ghosh and a long meditation on the first four novels of Amitav Ghosh by Jesper Hansen
'Language of Gods in the World of Men' by Sheldon Pollock and an article by the same author 'Crisis in the Classics'. Check also https://archive.org/details/LanguageOfTheGodsInTheWorldOfMen
P.S. I had doubts about fictionalized version of history in Amitav Ghosh novels. But I did not realize that Ghost started in the subaltern group and one part of 'In an antique land' first appeared there. Jesper Hansen explains
"Ghosh’s argument here is in line with the one presented by the Subaltern Studies Group and also by Spivak. Power and the making of history - even the act of writing itself - are closely intertwined, and in the novel they are closely associated with the elite (wazirs, sultans, etc.). Thus Ghosh does not have direct access to Bomma and his life; rather he has access to Ben Yiju, so Bomma’s consciousnessmbecomes what Spivak calls a “negative consciousness”: a consciousness created by a (deconstructive) interpretation of the letters of the Geniza in which they were originally found. One of the questions is thus how much interpretation - and implicit in this question how much deviation from the verifiable “truth” - should be allowed. Ghosh’s answer to the question is definitely that fiction should be
allowed to see the possibilities in the facts rather than let the facts limit the fiction, which is also suggested by Claire Chambers’ argument that Ghosh is committed
“to the view that fiction is as valid a way of explaining events as the more
prestigious authority of scientific reason.” "
No comments:
Post a Comment