Ranjan Ghosh

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today. Qualifying the 'non-historian' as an 'able' interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between history and theory within the current epistemological configurations and refigurations. He asks how history transcends the obsessive 'linguistic' turn, which has been hegemonizing literary/discourse analysis, and focuses greater attention on historical experience and where history stands in relation to our understanding of ethics, religion and the current state of global politics that underlines the manipulation and abuse of history.

Romance, Representation, Reading

A Lover's Quarrel with the Past

This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China’s encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.

Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia

Making Sense of the Secular

Antonia Navarro-Tejero

Arundhati Roy is not only an accomplished novelist, but equally gifted in unraveling the politics of globalization, the power and ideology of corporate culture, fundamentalism, terrorism, and other issues gripping today’s world. This volume – featuring prominent scholars from throughout the world – examines Roy beyond the aesthetic parameters of her fiction, focusing also on her creative activism and struggles in global politics. The chapters travel to and fro between her non-fictional works – engaging activism on the streets and global forums – and its underlying roots in her novel. Roy is examined as a novelist, non-fiction writer, journalist, activist, feminist, screenwriter, ideologist, and architect. This volume presents Roy's interlocking network of the ideas, attitudes and ideologies that emerge from the contemporary social and the political world.

Essays on Arundhati Roy

Globalizing Dissent

J. Hillis Miller

Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.

Thinking Literature across Continents

Edward Said is widely recognized for his work as a critic and theorist of Orientalism and the Palestine crisis, but far less attention has been devoted to his considerable body of literary and cultural criticism. In this edited collection, the contributors - many among the foremost Said scholars in the world - examine Said as the literary critic; his relationship to other major contemporary thinkers (including Derrida, Ricoeur, Barthes and Bloom); and his involvement with major movements and concerns of his time (such as music, Feminism, New Humanism, and Marxism). Featuring freshly carved out essays on new areas of intervention, the volume is an indispensable addition for those interested in Edward Said and the many areas in which his legacy looms.

Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World

In this book, Ghosh puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett s most popular and widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Contributors explore the play in reference to topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva, Derrida, the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in structural reading, and anti-existentialism."

Waiting and Other Thoughts

In Dialogue with Godot

Ever since Plato’s Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry. In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.

Ranjan Ghosh

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