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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.
List of contents
Preface / J. HIllis Miller vii
Acknowledgments / Ranjan Ghosh ix
Acknowledgments / J. Hillis Miller xi
Introduction: Thinking across Continents / Ranjan Ghosh 1
Introduction Continued: The Idiosyncrasy of the Literary Test / J. Hillis Miller 9
Part I: The Matter and Mattering of Literature
1. Making Sahitya Matter / Ranjan Ghosh
2. Literature Matters Today / J. Hillis Miller
Part II: Poem and Poetry
3. The Story of a Poem / Ranjan Ghosh 71
4. Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens's "The Motive for Metaphor" / J. Hillis Miller 93
Part III: Literature and the World
5. More than Global / Ranjan Ghosh 111
6. Globalization and World Literature / J. Hillis Miller 134
Part IV: Teaching Literature
7. Reinventing the Teaching Machine: Looking for a Text in an Indian Classroom / Ranjan Ghosh 155
8. Should We Read or Teach Literature Now? / J. Hillis Miller 177
Part V: Ethics and Literature
9. The Ethics of Reading Sahitya / Ranjan Ghosh 207
10. Literature and Ethics: Truth and Lie in Framley Parsonage / J. Hillis Miller 232
Epilogue / Ranjan Ghosh 259
Notes 263
Bibliography 291
Index 307
About the author
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently, Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet: From Philip Sidney to T. S. Eliot.
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently, An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.
Summary
Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debate and reflect upon what literature is, can be, and do in variety of contexts ranging from Victorian literature and Chinese literary criticism to Sanskrit Poetics and Continental philosophy.
