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Showing posts from March, 2018

Keynote Speaker: Joanne Shattock, Emeritus Professor, Department of English, University of Leicester: “Journalism and Literature: Contested Professions”

Professor Joanne Shattock presents a detailed historical account of the spurt of professionalization that became imbued in the field of journalism, in nineteenth- century England. Essentially tracing the trajectory that moves from the era of the ‘grub-street’ and penny-a- line to the commercialization of journalism, Shattock starts from the roots. Gibbons Merle refers to the word journalism in 1833, within his periodical Westminster Review. His main context: the lamentable lack of journalism’s respectability in England, whereas other European countries (France, in particular) had latched on to its diversifying abilities. It takes almost 20 years for the British Empire to recognize journalism as a veritable profession, with G.H. Lewes finally asserting that literature had started gaining renewed status as a profession- as lucrative as “the bar, or the church” because of the popularity and support provided by reviews, magazines and journals. Moreover, the advent of periodic

Grimms’ Fairy Tales: An Influence on Collection of Bengali Folktales

Grimms’ Fairy Tales (originally called Children’s and Household Tales) , a collection of fairy tales first published in 1812 by the Grimm brothers play an integral role in inspiring the collection of folklore all around the world. Although the retelling of folk stories in Europe date back to 16 th century Italy and 17 th century French parlors, the collection by Grimm Brothers’ was the one which introduced folk stories widely to the European masses. The legacy of the Grimm Brothers’ on nineteenth- century Bengal was the subject of the paper ‘The Grimm Brothers’ Legacy’ presented by Prof. Amrita Chakraborty. Prof. Chakraborty starts her presentation by stating that there have been several myths surrounding this collection, the major being that the brothers went to collect folk tales from the peasant community themselves. This idea arises from the notion that folklore is generally associated with the lower members of the society. These people who keep the tradition of folk tales o
“…He has got this wonderful intimate relationship with Tryphena and then he discovers he is committing incest, he was shocked...you know that could be really traumatic…” -Rosemarie Morgan (in an interview just after the Keynote Lecture) Professor Rosemarie Morgan’s remarkable and fascinating lecture on “Pathways of the Past: Visual Imprinting, Episodic Memory, and Hardy’s Wonder of Women” was uniformly thought provoking as well as engaging. She primarily focused on the significance of Tryphena in Thomas Hardy’s life, both as a human being and as an artist. She, in relation to him was his niece but emotionally, psychologically and sexually a much more seminal influence on his life, as the implied indication of the sentence goes. Beginning with a conceptual note on memory formation, epigenetics and Hardy’s interest in folklore, Professor Morgan went on to talk about how Tryphena figured in diverse ways in the portrayal of the female protagonists in his fiction, particular

On PAT ENDINGS AND NARRATIVES OF FAILED EMIGRATION, by Tamara Wagner

Victorian literature abounds with examples of the threats represented by immigrants to the British society. Anxiety, fear of the Other, desperate attempts at maintaining racial superiority were chief issues of the day. However, few scholars have pointed out that the emigration of British men and women to the colonies just as much changed the dynamics of the society and culture. In her quite interesting paper, Professor Wagner talks at length about the the 'systematic emigration' of middle class women, who usually had limited means. The Female Middle Class Emigration Society, set up in 1864, sought to ship young, mostly middle class women, abroad to colonies like Australia and New Zealand in an attempt to address the problem of 'redundant women'- or superfluous women, who were left with little marriage prospects following the migration of a large number of British men to the colonies. The emigration writings propelled in popular fiction harpe

FORTIFYING A NATURALIST’S BODY IN VICTORIAN INDIA: DESIRE, LOATHING AND HUMOUR IN E.H AITKEN’S NATURAL HISTORY: A PAPER BY RAJARSHI MITRA

Professor Rajarshi Mitra, in his fascinating paper, talks about the 19 th century naturalist E.H Aitken and how his writings capture the beauty of the tropical forests of India while criticizing the colonial reality. Edward Hamilton Aitken came to India as a civil servant. He spent almost fifty five years in India. He was one of the founding members of the Bombay Natural History Society. During an expedition to Goa, Aitken discovered a new species of anopheline mosquito, which was named Anopheles aitkeni after him. With achievements like such, we can obviously assume that Aitken was a natural historian who was enthralled by the flora and fauna of colonial India. Aitken reveals the jarring mixture of compassion, violence and sense of superiority the Victorians had towards the natural world. Professor Mitra observes the world of the colonizers to be an anthro-centric one, with man at the authoritarian position and all the animals and plants subservient to his will, much like A

On the keynote lecture “Revolution in the Rearview Mirror: Irish Autobiographies of the Revolutionary Years”, by Karen Steele

One of the keynote speakers Prof. Karen Steele delivered the Harendralal Basak Memorial Lecture on “Irish Autobiographies of the Revolutionary Years”. In the light of approaching centenary of Irish War of Independence there has been an increased focus on the Irish Revolution, such as the 2016 season ‘Waking the Nation’ at the Abbey theatre in Dublin. However, Prof. Steele pointed out that there has been a persistent cultural amnesia regarding women in the revolution. She talked about political activism of Irish revolutionaries through a critical reading of their autobiographies, especially those of women, as revolutionary life was deeply gendered. A recurring theme in her lecture was the contrast between the autobiographies of men and women involved in revolution – while men viewed their own developments in terms of the nation’s destiny, women’s life stories formed the marginalized, non-canonical counter-histories of colonial modernity. Solitary exploits were pivotal to men’

On (Pseudo) Science as Colonial Tools:Interrogating Nineteenth Century Phrenology and Criminology, by Samrat Laskar

Dr. Samrat Laskar in his paper entitled (Pseudo) Science as Colonial Tools:Interrogating Nineteenth Century Phrenology and Criminology critiques and questions the validity of the claims of Phrenology as a branch of Western Science. In stark contrast to indigenous knowledge, Western Science has often legitimised is superiority on the basis of empiricism and rational deductions. However, as Dr. Laskar argued that Phrenology soon became a tool against the colonial subjects, and its pseudo - scientific inferences were attacked and contested. Although the paper did not elaborate the ways in which Phrenology, which once had its heyday also regulated practices in penology, yet it is quite conceivable as to how it assumed the status of a crude imperialist tool and governed criminal laws. However, it was quite a surprise to note that even the colonial subjects extended their support or participated either voluntarily or involuntarily in what they saw as an emerging branch in the dis

On The Politics of Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal, by Aparna Bandopadhyay

A deliberate attempt to socio-culturally place ‘love’ in 19 th century Bengali literature, mainly through the fictional works by eminent literati Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay has been done by Dr Aparna Banerjee in her paper "The Politics of Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal.”She discussed the portrayal of women regarding pre-marital and extra-marital love and how major literary works of Bankim Chandra transgresses from the traditional perception. She provided examples from Bankim’s major works to support her claim. The contemporary intelligentsia, however, showed a distinct shift in their collective ideology by terming past erotic works of Sanskrit as ‘vulgar’ and ‘obscene’ as well as Bankim Chandra’s texts. The paper tried to find possible examples that transgresses the traditional ideas of love and also provides a critical commentary on them. The stereotype of women reading novel and how it degraded them morally, were major concerns of the Bengali intelligentsia o

On Epical Blindness in Tagore’s Plays, by Ishan Chakraborty

The paper “‘When there is no light’: Epical Blindness in the Plays of Rabindranath Tagore” by Prof. Ishan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English in Jadavpur University, presented by Apala Kundu talks about mythological influences on plays by Tagore, focusing on the issue of ‘blindness’. Epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata are two of the earliest and most important texts from ancient Indian literature. It is of no surprise that such texts would find space in telling and retelling in the contemporary literary space. The advent of the Brahma Samaj in 1828 brought about more tolerance towards reforming and renewing Hindu sentiments, and that is where the mythological genre came into existence. Playwrights and poets like Girish Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt wrote several texts inspired by episodes from the epics. Rabindranath Tagore, however, differed in his texts in the form that they were adaptations rather than inspirations of the main text. Prof. Chakraborty’s paper exp

On “Victorian Woman in the Warfield: Harriet Ward’s Reportage of the Seventh Frontier War (1844-47)”, by Teja Varma Pusapati

“She paved the way for Victorian women to engage in field reporting.” ‘Victorian Woman in the Warfield’ was indeed an interesting and unique topic chosen by the first speaker Dr. Teja Varma Pusapati for a panel discussing ‘The Victorian Other’. Harriet Ward (1808 – 1873) was a Victorian predecessor of Barkha Dutt, reporting from the ground zero of Seventh Frontier War at South Africa. Being a soldier’s wife, she wrote in the periodicals about the happenings in the battle-field using the model of reportage. One gets detailed perspectives of the war in her writings, often omitted by official news reports. The Seventh Frontier War, was a part of the Xhosa Wars, fought between the South African Xhosa tribes and the British troops sent from London. Harriet Ward covered this war extensively when she stayed at the Eastern Cape in South Africa from 1842 to 1847. Dr. Teja Varma Pusapati, formerly faculty at University of Oxford, and presently Assistant Professor at Shiv Nadar Univer

On The presentation on “Women, Beauty and the Public Sphere: A case for absences in Nineteenth-Century Bengal”, by Samata Biswas

The presentation on “Women, Beauty and the Public Sphere: A case for absences in Nineteenth-Century Bengal” by Assistant Professor Samata Biswas explored the location of nineteenth century women within the private or public spheres as the case may be, their transporting from one to the other, but more importantly the loss of the woman’s body proper in the process. The paper explored how the discourse on the female body disappeared from colonial Bengali society; with the exception of it being subject to arbitration and relegated as either desirable femininity or lascivious vanity. The paper further investigated the relationship between the (disappearance of) discourse on (the female) body as an instrument of sexuality or as an object of it, and the regulation and instruction of women’s behavior. It contends that the discourse on the body found its place “in the spaces constituted by women uninterrupted by men”. It suggests that discourse could be found in the very absences, a

On ATHEISM AS A CELEBRATION OF THE HUMAN: DEMYSTIFICATION OF RELIGION IN GEORGE ELIOT AND LUDWIG FEUERBACH, by Saswati Haldar

The paper presented by Professor Halder deals with the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach on the intellectual career of George Eliot, and how she interprets his ideas and incorporates them into her writing. Eliot, although debatable whether she can be labelled an agnostic or not, denounced the traditional doctrines of Christianity, a ‘historic and dogmatic religion’ and firmly put forward her faith in genuine human relationships . Eliot declared ‘atheism’ as ‘a religion of humanity’, free from the cynicism of being a supposed ‘non-believer’. Feuerbach maintained that the essence of Christianity is really, the essence of human feeling. It is man who created God in his own image, projecting in him the ideals and qualities that does not belong to an individual proper, but human beings as a collective whole. This psychological functioning, is what he would call the ‘essence of religion’. What is significant is Feuerbach’s Theory of Alienation, which states that religious belief is bas

On Lucy Morris, Frederick Fawn, and the Sawab of Mygawb: Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and the ‘cause of the Indian Prince’, by Ramit Samaddar

Assistant Professor at the English Department of Jadavpur University, Ramit Samaddar’s paper , “Lucy Morris, Frederick Fawn, and the Sawab of Mygawb: Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and the ‘cause of the Indian Prince’”, provides a deep insight into the imperialist tropes in Victorian Literature, particularly in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, published in 1871. In the wake of the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ of 1857, Victorian Literature had started focusing on India, their prime colony, with several other works like Moonstone, and The Sign of Four (amongst others) condemning anti-Anglo sentiments expounded by the natives. Being a campaigner for long-term territorial rule over non-whites, Trollope asserted that India was not a colony, as few whites lived there to ‘rule’. However, his common description of India as “alien, heathen and native”, was met with an exception in The Eustace Diamonds, with Lucy Morris championing the rights of an Indian prince., Surprisingly, in the

On “The Victorian Gaze: A Reading of the Ambivalent Victorian Mentality towards the Naked Body of Colonial Subjects” by Sneha Pan

Based on Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, Homi Bhabha, a key figure in postcolonial studies, came up with the concept of ‘ambivalence’ – it demonstrated how the colonial discourse failed to establish itself as a monolithic structure because of the differential relations between the identities of the colonizer and the colonized. This paper analyzes the problematic aspects and ambivalent nature of the Victorian gaze over the body of women living in colonized nations – who, according to Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, experience a “double colonization”: once by patriarchy and then again by colonialism. Focusing on various conceptions of the “unclothed body”, this paper interrogates the distinction between “naked” and “nude”, accorded by art critics like Kenneth Clark and John Berger - both are distinct “ways of seeing”. With reference to Jean- Lois Baudry’s concept of the ‘cinematic spectator’ and Foucault’s ‘panopticon’, it advances its investigati

On the Keynote Lecture: Tennyson, The Princess, and Tennyson’s Global Women Readers, by Linda K. Hughes

In her paper, Professor Linda K. Hughes argued that Tennyson’s poem The Princess, is a text which exemplified the relevance of replication in the nineteenth century by meticulously tracing its textual history and speaking about the global response it elicited from its female audience. The poem incorporated numerous iterations beginning from its initial publication in 1847 to its final version in 1853. She stated the different socio- political and cultural contexts that influenced Tennyson to make changes in each iteration such that, it becomes easier to align Tennyson with the ‘I’ who narrates the prologue and the epilogue of the poem. Although Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s indictment of the poem, as a tool for the imposition of normative ideologies may have some validity, yet as Professor Hughes shared with us personally, she appreciates the fact that Tennyson took up the cause of female education, exploring its emancipatory potential. The five versions of Tennyson’s poem as repl

On Rise of the artist illustrator: A paper by Aratrika Choudhury.

Aratrika Choudhury in her marvelously well researched paper, talks about the rise or claim of the artist illustrator in Turn-of- the-Century- Bengal. She talks briefly about the rising popularity of the print culture as indigenous printing presses were set up in and around the Bot-tola region of Kolkata. This lead to the crude illustrations which eventually started grazing the pages of the books published. The purpose of her paper was to show us how exactly the artist illustrator rose to popularity and how they created a new combination Western and Indian art into a strange hybridity in the earlier 20 th century. Beginning from the earliest illustrated Bengali book, Ananda Mangal, in which artist Ramchand Ray was responsible for two of the engravings in the book, as the engravings have his name carved. In her paper Aratrika says that the engravings “do not exhibit extraordinary artistic expertise, their fame lies in the fact that they were the first to adorn a Bengali printed

On “Lives and Afterlives of a ‘Victorian’ Text: Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge”, by Neelanjana Basu

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” With the above line from Milton, Dr. Neelanjana Bose began her presentation. She entertained the audience profusely as she ventured from Bollywood to Hollywood with Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge as her vehicle. At various points during her presentation she addressed the novel as a ‘sensational novel’, ‘agrarian drama’, of a ‘ Sophoclean unity and drama’ or indeed a ‘cinematic novel’, thereby showing her deep engagement with the text which had enabled her to have multiple viewpoints about the same. The Mayor of Casterbridge was published 132 years ago. Yet, Dr. Basu portrayed that the book has had several ‘afterlives’ in various forms. She cited several cinematic adoptions of the novel including the silent film adaption of 1921, which indeed took place in Hardy’s lifetime. She tried to show how Daag, the 1973 Yash Chopra romance may have been