M. PHIL QUALIFYING EXAM SCHEDULE 2010

Paper 1--6th July 11-30a.m--3-30p.m.
Paper 2-- 8th July 11-30a.m--3-30p.m.

CFP: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and literature

NEMLA 42nd Annual Convention: New Brunswick, New Jersey April 7-10, 2011

Call for Papers
Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

Contact email: arkaless@gmail.com

Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011

Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New
Brunswick, New Jersey

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words (The full papers are to be mutually exchanged and read well before the seminar and shortened 10 minute presentations, consisting of four double-spaced pages, are to be made in the session)


Seminar Description
The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his
work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

Therefore, the thrust-areas are (the abstracts may include these perspectives but need not be limited to these at all):

v Philosophy as influence on Beckett.
v Philosophy as intertextual cultural memory or a textual principle in Beckett.
v Beckett as an influence on 20th century Philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as an anti-philosophical discourse.
v Beckett and the cognitive philosophical tradition.
v The politics of philosophical appropriation in and of Beckett texts.
v The philosophical categorization of Beckett as a Modernist polemic of canonization.
v The philosophical status of Beckett and its contribution in a supposed undermining of the pragmatics of his theatrical practice as a playwright and stage-artist.



All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815
Mail: arkaless@gmail.com

PO CO CLASS

Ipshitadi to take the Anglophone African Lit Class on Monday, 3rd May from 2pm. Please all the po-co people be there. As usual we will have to hunt for a classroom! An Imaginary Homeland!

M.Phil. Post Colonial Lecture Schedule 2009 - 2010:-

9.4.10 - REALISM IN THE NEOCOLONIAL CONTEXT OF LATIN AMERICA - Prof. Kavita Punjabi

16.4.10 - POSTMODERN APPROPRIATIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES;THE CASE OF "MAGIC REALISM" - Prof. Kavita Punjabi

23.4.10 - CANADIAN LITERATURE(SPECIFIC TOPIC TBA) - Prof. Sucharita Chattopadhyay

30.4.10 - POSTCOLONIAL SPORTS - Prof Supriya Chaudhuri

7.5.10 - ANGLOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURES - Prof. Ipshita Chanda (To be confirmed later)

M.Phil Classes resume

Rimidi will take a class on Wednesday, 20th of January 2010 at 2pm.

Marksheets and Fees

The mark-sheets for the Qualifying exam are available now, and if you haven't already, I recommend you pick them up soon, so as not to give the university a chance to lose them! You will need your fee-book.

Also, you have to pay your second-year fees. I'm not sure there is any deadline for this, though I assume they will want it before you pay the exam fees, but anyway: it is Rs.950/-.

Exam Results

A notice announcing the provisional results of our Qualifying Exam has been put up on the notice board opposite the Head's Office. Take a look.

NO CLASS ON THIS FRIDAY..SANTANUDA BEGINS WITH REPRESENTATION ON 22ND, FOLLOWED BY P B ON FRIDAY, THE 24TH...

Exam Schedule (Re-revisited)

The notice is up next to the Head's Office. On July 6, we have Paper 1: Group A and B; while on July 8 we have Paper 2: Group A, Group B, Group C. This means that on 6th July we have our Theory papers, whilst on 8th July we have General Background and Post-Colonial/Cultural Studies. And the timings are from 11:30am to 3:30pm.

However I suggest you take a look at the notice yourselves, the next time you're in campus.

Exam Roll Numbers

Our Examination Roll Nos. for the Qualifying Exam are up, on the noticeboard to your left if you stand facing the door of the Head's office. And the likely dates of our exam seem to be the 6th and 8th of July.

In our General Background classes...

...this is, more or less, what we have done so far:

Renaissance

The lecture focused on the way in which the term ‘Renaissance’ was used in history and literary criticism in the last two centuries, thus attempting to prove that the phenomenon of the ‘Renaissance’ was a constructed entity that may or may not have corresponded to the way in which it actually took place. The debates regarding the time-span, the geographical distribution and the very use of the term ‘Renaissance’ were discussed. A brief discussion of the social and political condition under which texts were produced also took place.

Enlightenment

The development of the deliberately rationalist and secularist discourse, reflecting the divergence of science and philosophy from theology, was discussed at length. Specific concepts such as libertinism and pantheism, ideas of the natural morality and the absolute liberty of conscience, and issues such as the sexual liberation of women were also spoken of. Major figures of the period --- Newton, Locke, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza --- were mentioned in some detail.

Romanticism

The difficulties and contradictions inherent in the dating of the period were mentioned. The issue of the women poets was discussed, with special attention to the differences in the theories of creativity held by them and by the male canonical poets. We looked at the intricate and involved relationship literature had with contemporary politics, with reference to the culture of dissent. Figures such as Leigh Hunt and John Thelwall figured in this context, as well as in the context of the repressive legislation prevalent in England at the time, and the effects of the same on literary endeavours. The role of artists and musicians in fostering literary endeavour was also discussed briefly.

The Victorian Period

Discussion revolved around the “double” nature of Victorian society, with its enlightened legislation and obvious scientific and technological advancements on the one hand, and its darker underbelly of exploitation, inequality, and social callousness on the other. Major developments of the period, including the Industrial revolution and the Darwinian revolution, were discussed at some length, as was the Woman question, educational reforms, and the issue of suffrage. The social consciousness of many of the major Victorian novelists, as expressed in their novels, was discussed, and we looked at how this affected the development of the novel form.

Modernism

The revolutionary nature of Modernism, with its radical rethinking of the relation of reality to fiction, its apparent abandonment of well-established literary traditions, and its use of new and startling forms and idioms, was emphasized. The question of the roots of Modernism, and attempts to posit it in continuity with literary history were also discussed, as was the question of its complicated relationship to organized Christianity. We also looked at the limitations of Modernism.

Linguistics

Class discussion revolved around the shift of focus from diachronic to synchronic linguistics that occurred at the turn of the century, and noted the similar upheavals in literature at the same time, discussing the possibility of the two being related. We also briefly looked at the difference in focus between Sassure and the Post-Structuralists

Theatre Studies

We looked at the events leading up to the formal recognition of the field of Theatre Studies in the early twentieth century, and considered the subsequent major developments in it. Class discussion focused on the necessity of having Theatre Studies as a separate discipline, allied to but not dependent on, mainstream literary studies.

Post-Colonialism

Taking a historical account of the large-scale cultural interactions that marked as a starting point, discussion focused on how such interactions could be seen to have affected the cultural sensitivities of the communities concerned. We discussed why and how the cultural fallout of the European imperial projects were different from earlier empire-building attempts, and how attention to this aspect of cultural history could serve to illuminate our understanding of literature.

Post-Modernism

Discussion focused on the idea of Post-Modernism as a historical concept, and the conditions which led to its rise. We discussed the essentially negative nature of the idea of Post-Modernism. We also looked at some of the major developments in the theory.

Just to clear up any misunderstanding: I do not have any articles, reading lists etc. other than those that have been put up on the blog. It's all up --- I don't have anything else.

General Theory: Reading Lost

I'm very sorry about being so late in posting. I hope this will still be of some use.

There is a lot of secondary material on Greek historians. The following may be of some use.

1. Gregory Crane: Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity:The Limits of Political Realism, Berkeley · Los Angeles · London 1998

E-text at

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft767nb497&brand=ucpress

2. Simon Hornblower (ed.) Greek Historiography Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

3. I have already mentioned Francois Hartog's The Mirror of Herodotus, partly on Google Books

On Augustine, Markus is very reliable (NL), also on Google Books.

4. RA Markus: Saeculum: history and society in the theology of St. Augustine, Edition: 2, revised

Cambridge University Press, 1988 Partly on Google Books

5. JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, rev. ed 2003, Partly on Google Books

There is not much I can recommend on the Hunne lecture by way of commentary. Read the account (coroner's report) of his death and if possible More's version.

6. Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic, Penguin, 1982

You could also try to read a bit of Foucault's Madness and Civilization, at least grasp the general argument.

Benjamin:

Rajeev Patke critically reviews two books on Benjamin's view of history: “Benjamin's Theses on the Concept of History”. Well worth reading in itself. Andrew Benjamin's book is well known.

www.fsu.edu/~proghum/interculture/pdfs/patke%20rajeev.pdf 

Steinberg, Michael P., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

Class on Monday, 27 April 2009 (Cultural Studies)

Professor Ananda Lal will meet us for class on Monday, 27 April 2009, at 3:00pm.

ATTENTION

Students who are completing their dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Nilanjana Deb, please get in touch with her immediately.

You must be prepared to hand in your dissertation by the first week of July. If you feel you will be unable to do so, please look for another person to guide you, as Nilanjanadi will not be available after this time.

Class on Friday, 24 April 2009 (Cultural Studies)

Professor Swapan Chakravorty will meet us on Friday, 24 April 2009, at 2:10pm.

Class on Monday, 20 April 2009(Cultural Studies optional)

We will have class on Monday, 20 April 2009 with Professor Swapan Chakravorty, at 2:10PM.

Class on Friday, 17th April.

Professor Swapan Chakravorty will take a class today at 2.10pm.

class: cultural studies option

friday, 10th april being a holiday, there will be no class.

Prof Supriya Chaudhuri will meet the class at 2 pm on Monday, 13th April and will speak on New Historicism.
If required, she will you at a mutually convenient time later that week.

nilanjana gupta

Examination Forms.

Does anyone know anything when the examination forms are given out? I heard that the last date for the submission is 9th April.