Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction
What do R K Narayan, G V Desani, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, Suniti Namjoshi and Salman Rushdie have in common? They represent Indian writing in English over five decades. Vilified by many cultural nationalists for not writing in native languages, they nonetheless present a critique of the historical and cultural conditions that promoted and sustained writing in English. They also have in common a counter-realist aesthetic that asks its own social, political, and textual questions. Kanaganayakam analyzes the fiction of writers who work in this vibrant Indo-Anglian tradition and demonstrates patterns of continuity and change during the last five decades. Each chapter draws attention to what is distinctive about the artifice in each author while pointing to the features that connect them. The book concludes with a study of contemporary writing and its commitment to non-mimetic forms.
The Varthamanappusthakam or Is There Justice for the Narrating Subaltern?
The article examines India’s first modern travelogue, The Varthamanappusthakam, from the point of view of narratology and Kanaganayakam’s observations on storytelling from the margins. The focus is on the travelogue’s narratology, including the story and its narration, and on the discussion it triggers, in a secular academy that is Western or Westernized, with a closed canon that incorporates postcolonial studies. The article draws on, among other things, Gérard Genette’s narrative theories and Gerhart Husserl’s phenomenological discussion of communities. It makes an argument for the inclusion of a translation of a Christian text from the Indian subcontinent in the curriculum of English Studies as a challenge to preconceived notions of colonial India, thereby providing the required institutional approval that Gayatri Spivak points to.
Nietzsche's Moral Philosophy
Expounds and criticizes the moral consequences of Nietzsche's basic concept of the will to power. This study argues that Nietzsche's doctrines on moral subjects reveal a man profoundly torn between different and conflicting impulses.