Rupsa Banerjee

1:00-2:50: Ambiguous placement of the tale in F. S. Fitzgerald's oeuvre.
2.51-4:00: Form of the allegory studied alongside that in Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle.
4:01-7:40: Fitzgerald's relation to the new moneyed class in America.
7:41-11:00: studying the narrative's concerns about the economy alongside those in The Great Gatsby.
11:00-17:00- The use of humour in the narrative
17:01-20:57- study of the relation between the father and the son
20:58-29:00- Fitzgerald's symbolical characterization of history in the character of Button; compared with William Faulkner's treatment of the Southern past in The Sound and the Fury.
29:00-33:00-The dual concerns of the romance and the realist narrative in the tale, studied with reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne's treatment of the romance.
33:00-35:18- the tale inviting multiple perspectives of the youth and the aging towards the study of America's present of the 1920s.

1)Study of the novel's treatment of pornographic desires. The ideas are read alongside Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination".
2) The novel's critique of America of the 1950s and its proleptic characterization of the dystopic in twenty-first century society.
3) The novel's commodification of the experience of psychosis compared to that in video games.
4) As world literature: studied alongside the Bengali novel Dana by Balaichand Mukhopadhyay.

Points discussed in the lecture:
1) Literary and cultural milieu at the time O’Neil’s play is published.
2) The play as a form of social critique, brought about through the juxtaposition of the voices of Yank, Paddy and Long.
3) Similarities between O’Neil himself and the character of Yank.
4) Specific features of the character of Yank and his perceived relation with Mildred.
5) Reading the play with reference to the criticism of Herbert Marcuse.
6) Perceptions of a dualistic system of law and justice specific to the upper and lower classes.

Celestial Bodies, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019, signals the transitory nature of a singular world as the narrative displaces the characters between national territories like Oman, Egypt, and Canada and stresses the futility of emplacement within an absolute geographical signifier or language, even as their interpersonal relations struggle to hold on to the normalcy defined by tradition. The novel, originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Alharthi's PhD supervisor Marilyn Booth, co-winner of the prize, demonstrates the politics inherent in being housed in the English language. The paper argues that the problematization of the genre of the novel and the questioning of the efficacy of linguistic self-location within source and target languages allows for larger negotiations with issues of literary cosmopolitanism and the characterizations of the spatial signifier of the world. The expansion of the cultural and political identity of the Omanis, arising from a conflicted assimilation of modern European values, leads to changes in the form of the novel that attempts to hold on to its Arabic roots while rethinking the structure of the genre itself. The trope of forgetting, of both national and individual pasts and presents, is motivated in the novel to qualify a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges these very incommunicable gaps between national histories.

Submitted Dialogics Journal, October 2021

's poetry collections Excavations and Alstonefield include words and quotations from different literary sources, such as archaeological journals, Elizabethan lyrics, English and European folk songs, and contemporary poetry. Formal dissonance created through such a visceral intertextuality constitutes a linguistic confrontation with Britain's multiple histories. Riley's lyrics become metonymic extensions not just of physical place but also of intersecting histories; the poems question Britain's boundaries, whose porousness is instanced in textual memorials of cultural exchange. I argue that Riley's representation of the historical pluralities that constitute British identity confronts the nature of the divide between the north and south of England, between country and city, the state and population, and sound and silence. In Excavations, forgotten linguistic traditions such as the French "aube" and Renaissance word-inflections are resurrected as linguistic reminders of a heterogeneous cultural past. The musical structure generated here through line breaks and aposiopetic pauses complements Alstonefield's detailed cataloguing of musical traditions. The preoccupation with poetic production within contexts of fraught and constitutive historicities, then, culminates in descriptions of places that dilate beyond the geographical markers of place.

This article discusses Boosa movement literature, coming up in the 1970s in Karnataka, as addressing a range of concerns—from the indignities of caste-based discrimination to vernacular reflections on a synthesized modernity. I argue that in their communication of the ills faced by the dalits, the works carefully craft a distinct vernacular identity in the context of national literary projects and sublate questions of caste into the hybridization engendered by translation. The first section looks into how Boosa writers navigate the nationalist literary projects and assumptions around dalit writings in the Kannada language. Second, it explores the ideals of literary modernism as standardized within English literary practice and offers ways of rethinking contrasting representative styles that simultaneously grapple with an incongruous modernity that overlooks caste-based discriminations and vernacular rhetorical practices. Lastly, it looks into the ways in which translation reconstructs and validates identities that are otherwise delegitimized: the housing of the texts in the English language layers meaning that allows for a branching out of lived identity.

The modern sonnet—whether innocuously inserted into the larger body of a lyric (J. H. Prynne’s Sub Songs) or fractionally motivated to accompany the subject of its descriptive concern (Colin Simms’s Otters and Martens)—exhibits a desire to understand its place in an increasingly commercialized network of wants and needs. While the early modern sonnet’s distinct materiality stems from the assimilation of short forms such as the epigram, the modern sonnet’s experimentations with line breaks and flights from narration appear more as a formal consequence of the technologically facilitated shortening of distances and less as an exaltation of the genre’s predilection for the brief and the concise. In my paper, I study Cambridge poet, Ian Heames’s collections Sonnets (2016) as politicizing the truncated experience of reading the “short” sonnet—visually presented as fourteen-line sequences, often with parenthesis marks and single words doubling as lines. The interrupted enjoyment of the sonnet is posited against the promise of plenty inherent in multinational capital fueled economic advancement, plastic production and environmental exploitation. Thegradual unfurling of literary references is posited against the various speeds documented in the sonnets: that of the helicopter, the drone, the movements across cities and military occupation, among others.The laconic modern sonnet provides access to the individual by facilitating a condensed experience of different accelerations and stretching the particular to include the universal. It challenges enclosure into a sub-literary form intended to shadow the values of the genre even as it articulates a break with history in its radical departures from the conventions of the genre.

Building on the twenty-first century critical interest in the spatial humanities, this collection of essays examines the relations between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the "centre" and the "periphery". Taking its cue from the writings of Claudia Brodsky, for example In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent (2009), which argues for an awareness of constructedness of place as self-referent and language as self-expression, this book further examines literature's role in stretching the semantic limits placed around terms such as "place", and "space", and "centre" and "margin". The rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban, alienated geographies, enclosed within the determinism of history and dislocated from themselves by the originary impersonality of language, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one's locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and rebuilding identity. Given the slow-moving but long-in-the-making civilizational disasters of barring exodus of peoples to places of refuge and of constructing detention facilities at porous borders, this edited collection looks towards experimentations in literary form as dramatizing the impermanence of significations attributed to places. Literary writing posits interactive dynamics of the binaries of "centre" and "margin" and "nation" and "individual" as operating through a system of intersecting networks. Essays in this book explore the function of literary form in poetry, prose and drama that represent home-makings and re-envision identities in order to alert readers to the slow violence of being refused entry into history through a negation of the places of belonging. Rethinking Place, Reimagining Form shares its politics with works such as Eric Hayot'sA New Vocabulary of Global Modernism (2016), which establishes and analyses the connections between seemingly disconnected geographies through a study of artistic representations that are endemic to and those that are foreign to geographic places. For Hayot, identifying non-universal literary modes of conceptualizing reality helps overcome the critical regard and bias towards "Eurochronologisation" and the resultant delimitations placed around the imaginative potential of texts emerging in other historical contexts. Drawing from Hayot's examination of a valorization of particular texts and a unitary history, this collection connects the critique further with the invisibility surrounding material and cultural loss occasioned by displacements, exiles, and threats to subjective relations with geographical places. By looking at narratives and their re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve essays address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location. Orienting itself in the field of comparative literature, the collection studies the literary reconstructions of plural "worlds" and mobilizes their histories to form a connected narrative of writing as the imagined capital that restores agency todispossessed lives and destinies. Thus, a certain 1

Wood Circle (2021) unmakes lyric language as it carves out a unique intimacy between words and their referents. The poems, taken as isolated instances, do not generate specific images, but the collection as a whole evokes a fragility of reference which alternatively hinges on poetic language's own resistant folds and the multiple surfaces of the object-world. In his formally beguiling essay, "Imperfect Pitch", published in Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (1992), which effectively wraps itself around subjective reflections on the processural nature of writing and the emotional extremities of verse dispersions, Wilkinson argues for a "non-relational" tie existing between the experience of the world and the contours of lyric language. What is preserved in the poem is not the materiality of objects but dissociated modes [...]

Building on twenty-first-century critical interest in the spatial humanities, this collection of essays examines the relations between place and linguistic form and challenges the economic demarcations that instill divisions between perceived literary centers and their peripheries. The rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban, alienated geographies, enclosed within the determinism of history and dislocated from themselves by the impersonality of language, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. Given the slow-moving but long-in-the- making civilizational disasters that have led various governments to bar access to places of refuge and to construct detention facilities at porous borders, this edited collection looks towards experimentations in literary form as dramatizing the impermanence of significations attributed to places. Literary writing presupposes complex systems of intersecting networks as well as
interactive dynamics, even within the seeming binaries of “center” and “margin” and “nation” and “individual.” The eleven chapters in this collection explore the function of literary forms that represent diverse ways of being in place and re-envision identities in order to alert readers to the slow violence of being refused entry into history through a negation of the places of belonging.

Keywords: world literatures, pockets of circulation; geocriticism; deterritorialization of nation; fictionality of place;