Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some f... more Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some from mythology and folktales, others from contemporary history – in his collection Bhijakī Vahī (Sodden Notebook), first published in 2003 a few months before his death. The poems, each devoted to a different woman and sometimes narrated from their point of view, articulate tales of suffering, grief, and loss. The subjects include mythological figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Helen of Troy, but also real women such as the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, photographed by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. The symbolic apparatus of sacrifice, with its notions of residues, substitution, victims, and apotheosis, is consistently deployed around these figures as a way of approaching modern conflicts, and especially projects of mass extermination. These questions gain particular salience in the contemporary political conjuncture in India, defined by the rise of violent, majoritarian ideologies.
Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some f... more Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some from mythology and folktales, others from contemporary history – in his collection Bhijakī Vahī (Sodden Notebook), first published in 2003 a few months before his death. The poems, each devoted to a different woman and sometimes narrated from their point of view, articulate tales of suffering, grief, and loss. The subjects include mythological figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Helen of Troy, but also real women such as the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, photographed by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. The symbolic apparatus of sacrifice, with its notions of residues, substitution, victims, and apotheosis, is consistently deployed around these figures as a way of approaching modern conflicts, and especially projects of mass extermination. These questions gain particular salience in the contemporary political conjuncture in India, defined by the rise of violent, majoritarian ideologies.
Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of th... more Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of the act it implies. As a practice, it appears entirely alien to the modern world, but continues to be invoked as a value in struggles both personal and collective. This discrepancy is potentially productive and generative of insights that go beyond its initial premise. In order to arrive at them, this essay will attempt to synthesize, and articulate concepts and mechanisms related to sacrifice.
La Nuit’ represents a triumph of the medium in constructing a truly captivating and haunting in m... more La Nuit’ represents a triumph of the medium in constructing a truly captivating and haunting in memoriam. Druillet achieves this with a radical reconfiguration of comic books’ most basic assumptions about the use of colours, the deployment of panels in a poetic register and by pushing the paratext from the boundaries of the text to its very heart. Pierre F-D asks if there exists a specificity of the Fantasy genre in French comics and the work of Phillippe Druillet (as well as his esteemed colleagues from Metal Hurlant such as Jean Giraud, Enki Bilal, Caza, Paul Gillon etc.) shows that Fantasy in the world of the French Bande Dessinee is not merely the creation of marvellous new worlds and great adventures but it is also a metaphysical spectacle where the author’s gaze is turned within as much as it is towards the future, apocalyptic or not.
Hellboy is a comic book series created by the writer and illustrator Mike Mignola for Darkhorse c... more Hellboy is a comic book series created by the writer and illustrator Mike Mignola for Darkhorse comics in 1994. The Series consists of a twelve volume cycle beginning with Book I: The Seed of Destruction and has since spawned several films, both animated and live-action blockbusters, video games and a comic series extending beyond the 12 volume cycle and drawn by different artists from the Darkhorse stable. While nominally based around the superhero premise that has been so central to the American comics tradition, it draws far more deeply from the well of American Gothic fiction and ‘Weird Tales’ pulp horror, especially H.P Lovecraft (to whom the first volume is dedicated); while the introduction to Book I is written by another doyen of American Horror, Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1959). For the purposes of this paper I will focus on Book I in order to explore how Mignola subverts several established tropes of the Superhero genre, constructing Hellboy as a continuation of the myth building ethos of the original Gothic writers across the 19th and 20th centuries, from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King.
I analyse the role played by language, silence and embodiment in two sequences from two differen... more I analyse the role played by language, silence and embodiment in two sequences from two different works by the American author Herman Melville. The first is Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1928) [1] that concerns a young merchant navy man with a speech impediment, impressed into the British Royal Navy at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. The second is from Melville’s celebrated novel Moby Dick; or the Whale (1851) [2], a passage that occurs towards the beginning of this sprawling oceanic narrative.
The concept of World Literature has had many incarnations since Goethe pronounced those words two... more The concept of World Literature has had many incarnations since Goethe pronounced those words two centuries ago. However, what inflection can allow us to imagine this notion a fluid and dynamic space, where literatures and languages 'leak'into each other. I explore all these issues through a reading of A.K Mehrotra's translations of Prakrit love poetry, in The Absent Traveller
An account of the concept of Rooted Cosmopolitanism in conjunction with close readings from Arun ... more An account of the concept of Rooted Cosmopolitanism in conjunction with close readings from Arun Kolatkar's poetry/
First Year Master's Thesis. A Textual Analysis of travel literature reveals its capacity to bridg... more First Year Master's Thesis. A Textual Analysis of travel literature reveals its capacity to bridge the near and the far in a single gesture. I have explored Arun Kolatkar's body of English Poetry within the broader frame of Travel literature.
A Reading of Arun Kolatkar's poetry under the light of Travel literature and its juxtaposition of... more A Reading of Arun Kolatkar's poetry under the light of Travel literature and its juxtaposition of the strange and familiar. This presentation was made as a response to Prof. Jahan Ramazani's A Transnational Poetics, and to show it's influence on my own research.
Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of th... more Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of the act it implies. As a practice, it appears entirely alien to the modern world, but continues to be invoked as a value in struggles both personal and collective. This discrepancy is potentially productive and generative of insights that go beyond its initial premise. In order to arrive at them, this essay will attempt to synthesize, and articulate concepts and mechanisms related to sacrifice.
A paper on the shifting lines of identity among the Bene Israeli Jews of India, based on the fren... more A paper on the shifting lines of identity among the Bene Israeli Jews of India, based on the french documentary L'an prochain a bombay (Next year in Bombay)
Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some f... more Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some from mythology and folktales, others from contemporary history – in his collection Bhijakī Vahī (Sodden Notebook), first published in 2003 a few months before his death. The poems, each devoted to a different woman and sometimes narrated from their point of view, articulate tales of suffering, grief, and loss. The subjects include mythological figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Helen of Troy, but also real women such as the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, photographed by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. The symbolic apparatus of sacrifice, with its notions of residues, substitution, victims, and apotheosis, is consistently deployed around these figures as a way of approaching modern conflicts, and especially projects of mass extermination. These questions gain particular salience in the contemporary political conjuncture in India, defined by the rise of violent, majoritarian ideologies.
Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some f... more Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual Indian poet, deploys a series of female figures – some from mythology and folktales, others from contemporary history – in his collection Bhijakī Vahī (Sodden Notebook), first published in 2003 a few months before his death. The poems, each devoted to a different woman and sometimes narrated from their point of view, articulate tales of suffering, grief, and loss. The subjects include mythological figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Helen of Troy, but also real women such as the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc, photographed by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. The symbolic apparatus of sacrifice, with its notions of residues, substitution, victims, and apotheosis, is consistently deployed around these figures as a way of approaching modern conflicts, and especially projects of mass extermination. These questions gain particular salience in the contemporary political conjuncture in India, defined by the rise of violent, majoritarian ideologies.
Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of th... more Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of the act it implies. As a practice, it appears entirely alien to the modern world, but continues to be invoked as a value in struggles both personal and collective. This discrepancy is potentially productive and generative of insights that go beyond its initial premise. In order to arrive at them, this essay will attempt to synthesize, and articulate concepts and mechanisms related to sacrifice.
La Nuit’ represents a triumph of the medium in constructing a truly captivating and haunting in m... more La Nuit’ represents a triumph of the medium in constructing a truly captivating and haunting in memoriam. Druillet achieves this with a radical reconfiguration of comic books’ most basic assumptions about the use of colours, the deployment of panels in a poetic register and by pushing the paratext from the boundaries of the text to its very heart. Pierre F-D asks if there exists a specificity of the Fantasy genre in French comics and the work of Phillippe Druillet (as well as his esteemed colleagues from Metal Hurlant such as Jean Giraud, Enki Bilal, Caza, Paul Gillon etc.) shows that Fantasy in the world of the French Bande Dessinee is not merely the creation of marvellous new worlds and great adventures but it is also a metaphysical spectacle where the author’s gaze is turned within as much as it is towards the future, apocalyptic or not.
Hellboy is a comic book series created by the writer and illustrator Mike Mignola for Darkhorse c... more Hellboy is a comic book series created by the writer and illustrator Mike Mignola for Darkhorse comics in 1994. The Series consists of a twelve volume cycle beginning with Book I: The Seed of Destruction and has since spawned several films, both animated and live-action blockbusters, video games and a comic series extending beyond the 12 volume cycle and drawn by different artists from the Darkhorse stable. While nominally based around the superhero premise that has been so central to the American comics tradition, it draws far more deeply from the well of American Gothic fiction and ‘Weird Tales’ pulp horror, especially H.P Lovecraft (to whom the first volume is dedicated); while the introduction to Book I is written by another doyen of American Horror, Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1959). For the purposes of this paper I will focus on Book I in order to explore how Mignola subverts several established tropes of the Superhero genre, constructing Hellboy as a continuation of the myth building ethos of the original Gothic writers across the 19th and 20th centuries, from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King.
I analyse the role played by language, silence and embodiment in two sequences from two differen... more I analyse the role played by language, silence and embodiment in two sequences from two different works by the American author Herman Melville. The first is Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1928) [1] that concerns a young merchant navy man with a speech impediment, impressed into the British Royal Navy at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. The second is from Melville’s celebrated novel Moby Dick; or the Whale (1851) [2], a passage that occurs towards the beginning of this sprawling oceanic narrative.
The concept of World Literature has had many incarnations since Goethe pronounced those words two... more The concept of World Literature has had many incarnations since Goethe pronounced those words two centuries ago. However, what inflection can allow us to imagine this notion a fluid and dynamic space, where literatures and languages 'leak'into each other. I explore all these issues through a reading of A.K Mehrotra's translations of Prakrit love poetry, in The Absent Traveller
An account of the concept of Rooted Cosmopolitanism in conjunction with close readings from Arun ... more An account of the concept of Rooted Cosmopolitanism in conjunction with close readings from Arun Kolatkar's poetry/
First Year Master's Thesis. A Textual Analysis of travel literature reveals its capacity to bridg... more First Year Master's Thesis. A Textual Analysis of travel literature reveals its capacity to bridge the near and the far in a single gesture. I have explored Arun Kolatkar's body of English Poetry within the broader frame of Travel literature.
A Reading of Arun Kolatkar's poetry under the light of Travel literature and its juxtaposition of... more A Reading of Arun Kolatkar's poetry under the light of Travel literature and its juxtaposition of the strange and familiar. This presentation was made as a response to Prof. Jahan Ramazani's A Transnational Poetics, and to show it's influence on my own research.
Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of th... more Sacrifice is distinguished both by its polyvalence as a notion, and the relative simplicity of the act it implies. As a practice, it appears entirely alien to the modern world, but continues to be invoked as a value in struggles both personal and collective. This discrepancy is potentially productive and generative of insights that go beyond its initial premise. In order to arrive at them, this essay will attempt to synthesize, and articulate concepts and mechanisms related to sacrifice.
A paper on the shifting lines of identity among the Bene Israeli Jews of India, based on the fren... more A paper on the shifting lines of identity among the Bene Israeli Jews of India, based on the french documentary L'an prochain a bombay (Next year in Bombay)
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