Suman Gupta

Children and Adults

Perhaps the Harry Potter phenomenon, the enormous success of the books, is not a matter of book covers and things outside readers and texts; perhaps the phenomenon is one to do squarely with texts and readers. Perhaps the books are so successful because they have received extraordinary approbation from the readers they were primarily and ostensibly directed at — children. Everything is clear and above board then: the success of the Harry Potter books proves that they are genuine articles, books that are really for children, that children actually enjoy. The scale of success might indicate that these are more genuinely books for children than other books that are produced as such. Perhaps the whole Harry Potter phenomenon devolves from a perfect match between text and intended readership, and this has to do with the books being for children and being read with pleasure by children. There is nothing more complicated about the phenomenon, everything else follows logically from that. This is the view that is unsurprisingly championed in a feature in the Advertising Age: The popularity of Harry Potter emerged with the schoolyard chatter, not with marketing hype. Today, two-third of kids ages 8 to 18 have read at least one in author J.K. Rowling’s series of Potter books- properties that initially arrived with comparatively little of the fanfare we’ve come to associate with new book titles.

Social constructionist identity politics and literary studies

This fascinating interdisciplinary study presents a critique of social constructionist identity politics, which is distinguished from specific identity-based political positions, from within and with social constructionist commitments. The first half of the book focuses on the conceptual aspect of such politics with regard to the humanities generally. In particular, the logic of embodiment, the nuances of institutionalization, and recent developments in this area are discussed. Gupta also examines the institutionalization of social constructionist identity politics in literary studies, considering the role of self-announcements in critical writing, theory textbooks, and notions of canonicity.

Sociological Speculations on the Professions of Children's Literature

This essay examines the academic institutionalization and the affiliated professionalization of childrens literature. A sociological analysis of this area is attempted, with the larger context of academic enquiry and associated professionalism in our world in mind, and with an awareness of the ideological imperatives implicit therein. Three directions are explored to assess the current position of childrens literature. These are: childrens literature as a grouping of professional interests; childrens literature as part of the academic discipline of literature in institutional terms; and the institutionalization of childrens literature within the broad dynamic of social systems.

Introduction: Academia and the Production of Unemployment

In communism, Marx and Engels wrote in 1845–1846, everyone is able ‘to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, […] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47). Now, is this not how everyday life of today’s academics looks like? Are they not also teaching in the morning, serving coffee in the afternoon, proofreading in the evening, and grading after dinner, without ever becoming teachers, waiters, proofreaders, or PhD supervisors? Indeed, the world of academic workers appears as what Marx and Engels described as communism. But then again, the wealth of nations also ‘appears as an “immense collection of commodities”’, to quote a later Marx book (1976, p. 125), the one devoted, according to Fredric Jameson at least, to the question of unemployment (see Jameson 2001, pp. 2–3). And this is precisely the difference between the prefigured communism of the ‘early’ Marx and the criticised capitalism of the ‘mature’ Marx, namely, the difference between the undoing of employment and, quite simply, unemployment. Academics today appear as communists insofar as they are in effect unemployed.

Big issues around a small-scale phenomenon: vernacular pulp fiction in English translation for Indian readers

This paper explores the implications of the recent appearance of some Indian vernacular pulp fiction texts in English translation for Indian readers. As background, the first of three main sections outlines the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, and also briefly examines recent thinking about the position of English in India. The second section examines the habitual Indian English-readers’ perspective of such pulp fiction in translation, and the third that of Hindi commentators insofar as relevant here. These two latter sections do not offer a linear argument, or undertake a close reading of specific texts. Rather, they draw a picture of vernacular and English popular print culture in India, wherein various slippages and cross-connections are apparent.

Critical Practice in the English Studies Classroom: Observations in Bulgaria

This paper argues that the classroom is a critically salient space for English Studies in ordinarily non-Anglophone contexts, where disciplinary boundaries are negotiated in ways that are redefining the discipline. In other words, in such contexts the classroom is not simply a space where the discipline as it is currently constituted or determined by advanced research and scholarly formations is conveyed, but is a space within which the discipline is constructed and reconstructed constantly with local realities in view. This is particularly so for English Studies in non-Anglophone contexts, it is maintained, because of the neglect such contexts suffer in the Anglocentric mainstream of the discipline. Since English Studies is now a global academic discipline, and is not confined to Anglophone contexts, such disciplinary negotiations are especially noteworthy. By way of evidence for this argument, this paper reports on classroom observations made in three state universities in Bulgaria in 2007–8. Some of the general features of English Studies in Bulgaria which informed these observations are outlined with regard to programme and course structures, student expectations and preconceptions of teachers. The observations are given in the final section, and chart some of the practices that can be discerned in teaching and learning whereby the boundaries of the discipline are critically negotiated. English Studies in Bulgaria, as in many non-Anglophone contexts, is structured as a composite of English language, literature and culture studies, and the observations in question cover all those directions. Importantly, these observations were not undertaken with a view to judging the efficacy of teaching-learning strategies or making normative recommendations about effective teaching. Classroom practices are noted here only insofar as they appear to impinge upon conceptions of the discipline itself.

Li Rui, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Lin Bai: Four Contemporary Chinese Writers Interviewed

Li Rui, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Lin Bai are among the most highly regarded and widely discussed authors of contemporary Chinese literary fiction. They are also of roughly the same generation of writers, who established themselves after the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s. The following interviews were conducted in Chinese by email. The interviewer decided to pose the same questions to each author, with a view to presenting a comparable set of responses. The questions were designed to encourage the authors to reflect, not only on the form and content, but also on the circulation of their writings in the midst of significant changes in China’s literary publishing practices and reading habits. Some of the questions arose from circumstances specific to the Chinese context. After the Cultural Revolution and particularly in the 1980s translations of literary works from European languages became especially popular, picking up in some sense on the impact of literature in translation in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence question seven, which invited these authors to consider the role of such translations in their own writing. The interviewer was struck by the fact that the full texts of recently published novels by these and other authors were freely available on various websites, apparently without arousing any misgivings in authors or publishers. Thus question eight was posed.

Conclusion: Questions and Prospects

Beyond textual expressions which chart the entrenchment of social constructionist identity politics in literary studies — and arguably more widely in the humanities and social sciences — lie other relatively intractable, unrecorded, transient, and yet familiarly institutional expressions. The recorded tracings of Theory-‘against Theory’-‘after Theory’ developments, of self-announcements, of textbook and anthology production, of canon debates, constantly emanate from and return within such a diffuse hum of numerous untextualized exchanges and communications and gestures. Ultimately, such untextualized exchanges moderate the everyday life of academic institutional spaces amidst other kinds of institutional spaces and within the broader life of society. So, beyond those textual traces that the previous three chapters are devoted to there is this larger field of everyday institutional expressions, and it may be expected that just as identity politics is entrenched within and structures the disposition of textualized expressions of literary studies, it is so too for untextualized expressions. If identity politics is institutionalized, it is as much within the ebb and flow of the untextualized everyday life of literary studies as within the textualized archive. To try to render this everyday institutional life tractable, to categorize and analyse its nuances, to collect observations about it and systematize them, would be akin to what Geertz described as collecting ‘convergent data’ from a wider range of sources than this study can attend to. This study has attended to a narrowly circumscribed and limited range of observations, drawing on a particular kind of source — but the inferences available from that seem to me to be sufficiently indicative.

In Search of Genius: T.S. Eliot as Publisher

I should never advice any young writer even to go into a publisherʼs offi ce, though that business had made living and writing possible for me — but fortunately, I think, I did not become a publisher until I was old enough to have developed a pretty strong resistance to the dangers of concerning myself with other peopleʼs books. — T.S. Eliot to Keidrych Rhys, Easter Monday 1947, at The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

On race: 34 conversations in a time of crisis

whole chapter on how migrant Irish and European workers “become white” and how a process of “Americanization” often viewed as a conservative construction process was contested and appropriated by organized labour through acts of interethnic cooperation. Barrett is clear in contextualizing what happens on the “ground” within the broader framework of hegemonic ideas around “race” at the level of the state, employers, popular culture and the press that ensure such ideas are supported, reflected and reinforced. Barrett demonstrates a high degree of sensitivity and empathy in dealing with those subjects tasked with resisting reactionary forces within the workers’ movement. This is one of the many strengths of the book. Collectively, its main contribution is the inclusion of fascinating and important details of individual narratives of subjective experiences and their inter-linking to the multiple identities of those who formed part of a wider collective of workers. It details well how workers (including the various waves of newly arrived immigrants) survive and adapt during periods of rapid change, poverty and injustice. Here we are exposed to narratives around how individual personal and subjective experiences – emotions, relationships, health, culture, children, open marriage, abortion, sexuality and others impact identities and experiences around class, religion, race and ethnicity, trade unionism and political activism. It is difficult to do justice here to the fascinating detail and myriad of experiences that go to make up this important study of race, ethnicity and class identity in the US. This book makes an important and significant contribution to our understanding and knowledge of workers’ history per se. It will strengthen and add a new paradigmatic dimension to the proud list of left and seminal academic and activist historians, sociologist, political scientists and others that have developed history from “the bottom up” perspectives. This is a necessary read for all scholars and activists interested in race, ethnicity, gender, class, identity and US history.