Thinking Literature Across Continents

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.

Table 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.

Review :
"As Ghosh makes a gesture to develop a new sense of universal literature, one that infuses both Western and developing world literary traditions and histories, Miller reflects on the impact of deconstruction and the dominance of new media in Western culture and society, and provides some redemptive values of literature. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - Y. Shu (Choice) "Immensely knowledgeable and thought-provoking." - Susana Onega (CounterText) "The focus of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s ambitious, distinctive, and highly engaging book Thinking Literature across Continents is nothing less than the world (the meaning of 'the world' and what is happening to it, above all from the perspective of people involved in education, whether teaching or being taught), together with that seemingly familiar yet peculiar, elusive thing called literature." - Nicholas Royle (Comparative Literature Studies) "The highest appeal of the volume lies in their recourse to supposedly incommensurable discursive and artistic practices. Each issue at the core of the five parts of the book is treated back to back by Ghosh and Miller, with a laudable desire to engage in some ways of exchange." - Laurent Dubreuil (Comparative Literature Studies)