kriticulture

By M. L. Raina Marxist Shakespeares Edited by Jean Howard& Scot Cutler Shershow Routledge, London & New York Pages xii+304. $27.95 “Others abide our question/Thou art free”—Matthew Arnold. Is he, really? Quite often, the bard has been wheeled around in the shopping trolleys of gossip and rumour-mongers, ideologues and sundry other interpreters, and, in our time, the peddlers of post-modern, post-structuralist, new historicist and feminist merchandise. He has been deglamourised and brought down from his pedestal by critics, stage directors and film makers. We are asked not to look up to him but to see beyond his myth. As a student I read my Shakespeare in ignorance of Ernest Jones’s Freudian speculations and Laurence Olivier’s guilt-ridden rendering of Hamlet on film. We knew nothing of Sergei Bondarchuk’s film of Hamlet as a critique of the feudal age, nor did have access to John Gielgud, Paul Robeson, Ralph Richardson or Dam...

Essay By HENRY ALFORD We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library. I speak of the letter that ran: “Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here,” which the playwright Mark O’Donnell found some years ago in a used paperback. I speak of any of those bizarre objects — scissors, a used Q-tip, a bullet, a baby’s tooth, drugs, pornography and 40 $1,000 bills — that have been discovered by the employees of secondhand bookstores, according to The Wall Street Journal and AbeBooks.com. Mystery surrounds these deposits like darkness. But the motives of some depositors — the novelist David Bowman, for instance — are knowable. “I was cleaning out a drawer and thought, Let’s do something with this,” Bowman said of the day four years ago when he stumbled upon all of the rejection lette...

The Nigerian writer talks about literature and faith I’m fascinated with the process of creating a character and the freedom of the creative process. I’m discovering as well, learning myself. Since I only realized I had the gift ten years ago, I felt I needed to develop this. I also like fiction because it is not doctrinaire. It is exploratory and you are invited to come and see, just like Jesus first invited would-be disciples to ‘come and see’. What you do after seeing is left to you. ... ... ... ... For example, when I read in newspapers that one million Rwandese were killed by their compatriots, it makes no sense to me. I have not seen a million people before. For me to even begin to understand, I may have to see how one person was killed and how much propaganda went into such an act. And if I hear someone sacrificed her life for another person, I try to work out in my mind how this was possible. Link

Fifteen Theses Rajesh Kumar Sharma 1 If democracy in India has not failed dramatically, this may not mean it has succeeded beyond question. Failures need not be absolute. The absence of one or more disasters in the short history of a democracy might screen from view some subtler and larger failure. Acknowledging the possibility of such a failure would require us to reconsider the very terms in which the public discourse of democracy is conducted. 2 If democracy is a particular “form of government”, the “form” may be still in good shape and yet all may not be well. 3 There is a danger in envisaging democracy as a state of affairs that comes to obtain for ever or long. The end of democracy does not necessarily mean, as Plato surmised, its replacement by some other form of government. Democracy may retain its form and yet have been undone. In the age of universal democracy, the real threat to democracies lurks within and in the realm of the universal. Hence the need to interrogate the po...