Invitation Balvant Parekh Distinguished Lecture Series 2015

Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences cordially invites you to attend the Balvant Parekh Distinguished Lecture which is part of a series initiated in memory Shri Balvant K. Parekh, the founder of the Centre.

Topic Literatures of the World:

An Inquiry into the Possibilities for Literary Study in a Globalizing Context

Speaker

S. Shankar

Professor of English, University of Hawaii at Mnoa

Date and Time:

24 March 2015 at 4 pm

Venue: Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences

C-302, Siddhi Vinayak Complex, Behind Vadodara Railway Station, Alkapuri, Baroda-390007 Ph: +91 265 2320870; www.balvantparekhcentre.org.in

About the Speaker

S. Shankar is Professor of English and the former Director of the

Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. He is a novelist, critic, and translator whose work has appeared in a

wide variety of venues. Shankars critical books are Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text (SUNY Press, 2001)

and Flesh and Fish Blood: Translation, Postcolonialism, and the

Vernacular (2012, U of California P; South Asia edition from Orient

Blackswan). Flesh and Fish Blood won the Honorable Mention Award

of the Rene Wellek Prize Committee of the American Comparative

Literature Association for 2013. His novels A Map of Where I

Live and No End to the Journey appeared in 1997 and 2005 respectively

(a Spanish translation of the latter has since appeared); he has also

translated two works from Tamil into English: the full-length Tamil

play Water! and the Krishna devotional Alaipaayuthey. He is also co-editor of the widely adopted anthology Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (New

Press, 2003). Shankars scholarly articles, poems, reviews, and literary essays have appeared in such academic journals and popular venues as PMLA, Cultural Critique, Tin House, Massachusetts Review, Outlook,

The Hindu, Pioneer, Village Voice, and The Nation. He received his graduate degrees from

Madras University and the University of Texas, Austin.

A Synopsis of the Lecture In his presentation, S. Shankar explores models for the comparative study of literature

within a global context. He critiques the current return to notions of World Literature in

the American academy and elsewhere. He points out not only that the "world" in World

Literature represents the globe in problematic ways but that "literature" too in such

formulations is homogenized and drained of complexity. Shankar's critique is enabled by

an engagement with developing notions of "literature" through the twentieth century

within Tamil and, more nationally, Indian contexts. He demonstrates how these notions

are often incompatible with the idea of World Literature. Accordingly, Shankar concludes

with an argument for what he calls "literatures of the world" (rather than World

Literature) as a formulation through which literature might be studied comparatively.