kriticulture

A group of scholars thinks evolutionary science can reinvigorate literary studies By BRITT PETERSON In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" And s...

Patrick Horan The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has also added Melbourne to its Creative Cities Network. Melbourne joins Edinburgh as a City of Literature and now sits alongside other cities in the network including Berlin, Buenos Aires and Montreal as Cities of Design and Bologna and Seville as Cities of Music. Arts Minister Lynne Kosky said the award recognised and celebrated Melbourne’s rich literary culture, history and creative talent. ... ... ... ... ... Booker Prize-winning Victorian writer Peter Carey lent his support to Melbourne’s bid and the city’s literary credentials. “I can think of no other Australian city where the pleasures of reading and discussion are so passionately pursued,” Mr Carey said. Link

Re-Markings is a biannual journal of English Letters. The journal aims at providing a healthy forum for scholarly and authoritative views on broad cultural issues of human import as evidenced in literature, art, television, cinema and journalism. Special Numbers/Sections devoted to events, issues and personalities are a regular feature of Re-Markings . Launched in March 2002 Re-Markings is in its seventh year of publication in 2008. In this short span the journal has made its presence felt emphatically in literary and academic circles with appreciative comments coming from senior academicians, statesmen and writers in India and abroad. Charles Johnson, the most persuasive voice in Afro-American writing today, responded to Re-Markings thus: “I've now read (twice) this issue's (March 2004) introduction, and looked over the material included on poet David Ray. All in all, with its impressive global range and vision, and especially the international writers included, this iss...

Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet From The Guardian. Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert's Guide To Cinema. When were you happiest? A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening. What is your greatest fear? To awaken after death - that's why I want to be burned immediately. ... ... ... ... Aside from a property, what's the most expensive thing you've bought? The new German edition of the collected works of Hegel. What is your most treasured possession? See the previous answer. What makes you depressed? Seeing stupid people happy. What do you most dislike about your...

Xolela Mangcu And our experience with Thabo Mbeki and Robert Mugabe has demonstrated that intellectuals can also lead their people to extinction. The question is whether a member of the Nkandla middle classes, Jacob Zuma, can preside over the re-emergence of a middle-class culture in keeping with our oldest and most cherished values — education, faith and temperance. Read here .

URL: http://www.poetryvisualized.com/media/123/Poetry_by_Carl_Sandburg_-_Good_Morning_America/

Fitting farewell to Palestinian poet By Heather Sharp From a formal honour guard in the presidential compound to a jostling crowd around a hillside gravesite, Mahmoud Darwish's final journey reflected his place in the emotions of Palestinians. His poetry on the Palestinian identity earned him a Palestinian Authority-sponsored funeral with a fanfare second only to late leader Yasser Arafat's. But with youths in jeans and sunglasses and security guards sharing emotional hugs, among the thousands who turned out to pay their respects, the massive popular following of his simple, evocative writing was evident. Read here .

By MARK EDMUNDSON This hunger for life has a number of consequences, for now and for the future. It's part of what makes this student generation appealing, highly promising — and also radically vulnerable. These students may go on to do great and good things, but they also present dangers to themselves and to the common future. They seem almost to have been created, as the poet says, "half to rise and half to fall." As a teacher of theirs (and fellow citizen), I'm more than a little concerned about which it's going to be. Read here .

By Asad Zaidi Translated from Hindi ( '1857 : Saman Ki Talash') by Rajesh Kumar Sharma (This draft is being put online for the purpose of attracting comments and suggestions. The readers can read the original poem, written in Hindi, at http://pratilipi.in/?p=323 ) The battles of 1857 that once upon a time were far-off battles are here and now. In these times of shame and of a sense of wrong when every wrong oppresses you as your own doing, the ears catch the rumble of war-drums of the mutiny and also the hubbub that is so, so Indian and the whispering of frightened pimps and traitors and the restive footfalls of chance-mongers. This could just be an effect of fiction and of commercial cinema produced since. But this is certainly not the clamour of those 150 crore rupees which the Government of India has sanctioned to celebrate the 150 th anniversary of the First War of Independence , sanctioned...

Rajesh Kumar Sharma (This is a revised version of the previous post. It appears along with Hindi translation in the August issue of the bilingual bimonthly journal Pratilipi at http://www.pratilipi.in / ) Asad Zaidi’s disturbingly powerful poem opens with a complex telescoping: 1857 has returned, with an immediacy that it did not have in 1857. The battles that seemed far away are now right here. At the door. You could put off the fight then. You cannot now. You could probably say then, “It is for them to take care of freedom.” Now it must be taken care of by you . Delhi was a long way away then. It is everywhere now. One can think of two Delhis. The symbol of freedom to be won. And the symbol of a kind of power that is a menace to freedom. There is guilt and a sense of wrong. Can we evade the burden of responsibility for all that has gone wrong? But then a generalized sense of universal responsibility may hide a pathological condition also. The narrati...

By Annie Zaidi May you not give birth to monsters. May your children not have the haunches of a pig. May your pigs not have horns from highland cows. May your salmon be wild and your prawns unfarmed. May your goats be purebred and your cotton, white gold. May you bloom and grow bloom and grow and may you know when to stop Courtesy: Pratilipi Read more poems by Annie Zaidi here .

By JAMES SEATON It may be hard to imagine -- given our current obsessions with television shows, movies, instant-messaging, Facebook and blogs -- but literature was once at the center of American cultural life. In the middle of the 20th century, novels and poems, of varying quality and aspiration, were widely read and widely talked about. And literary merit was discussed and hotly debated by critics whose essays, in Garrick Davis's words, "courted the educated public with their elegant prose." Read the full article here

A Reading of Asad Zaidi’s Poem Asad Zaidi’s disturbingly powerful poem opens with a complex telescoping: 1857 has returned, with an immediacy that it did not have in 1857. There is guilt and a sense of wrong. Can we evade the burden of responsibility for all that has gone wrong? The speaking voice is ambivalent: are ‘we’ the people or the writers, or both? The soundscape, too, is ambivalent: there is the restive, loud India of people and there is the whispering India of agents and touts and political opportunists. Maybe this reality of contemporary India is the product of fiction and commercial cinema. Our unreal reality. But also an ironic shifting of the blame for sordid reality on to fiction and cinema. The aporia of representation. The metaphor of noise again changes – to become the tinkle-tinkle of money. The poem takes aim and fires at a Prime Minister’s magisterial faux pas. The telescoping returns: freedom has become only a name for the quest for a ...

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate But nuclear power is not a solution to climate change -- rather, it causes problems. Amory Lovins is the co-founder and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. He makes simple, powerful points against nuclear: "The nuclear revival that we often hear about is not actually happening. It is a very carefully fabricated illusion ... there are no buyers. Wall Street is not putting a penny of private capital into the industry, despite 100-plus percent subsidies." He adds: "Basically, we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for. But you won't get any in a market economy." Read the article here

By Rahnuma Ahmed `You should not have written about such sensitive issues in such indecorous language,’ faculty members at Jahangirnagar University (JU) told me and my ex-colleague, Manosh Chowdhury. It was 1997, four years before I left JU to become a writer. Read the complete article here

Mistaken identity Obsessing about culture traps people in their own history, argues Kenan Malik Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have “conflicting credos but the same vision of the world”. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to “confine individuals to their group of origin”. Both undermine “any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples”. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism. http://newhumanist.org.uk/1809

by Wilfred M. McClay Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear. Enter the eminent literary scholar Stanley Fish, author of a regular blog for The New York Times, who addressed the subject with a kicky piece entitled “Will the Humanities Save Us?” (Jan. 6, 2008). Where there is Fish there will always be bait, for nothing pleases this contrarian professor more than ­double-­crossing his readers’ expectations and enticing them into a heated debate, and he did not ­disappoint.... Link

Bright ideas in the Wild West By Jonathan Marcus Hundreds of people pay to attend - it is probably the most intellectual holiday camp in the world . . . . http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7488333.stm

By V.V.B. Rama Rao "Sleepwalking into segregation" is the phrase Dominic Casciani of BBC New home affairs used, while analyzing the question 'A Cohesive Britain?' The most important, and the not so well recognized, danger for our country is the dwindling cohesion of our society. Cohesion is the most important parameter for a society to exist. When this cohesion is challenged society stands in imminent danger of fractionalization, secession, segregation and finally disintegration. Society is a conglomerate of a people with a unique identity. Body Politic and Social Fabric are phrases, which suggest binding, and togetherness to make the group viable to stand on its own preserving its identity and homogeneity. Minor external differences, call them variations pleasantly, exist but they should not be accentuated for ill-conceived short-term gains. Reverence for authority besides near similarity of mindsets and perceptions, make for cohesion. Fellow feelin...

Fish swimming to the harmonies of divine kirtan in the Sarovar, Gurudwara Dukh Nivaran Sahib, Patiala