'What is a Classic?' Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon

我的专著_“什么是经典？”《后殖民时代的重写和经典的发明》，考察了20世纪和21世纪英国和英语国家文学（以及文学批评）中文学价值的独特争论。这部作品结合了不同的学术焦点——后殖民、文学历史和教学——并借鉴了艾略特、康拉德、奈保尔、赛义德和库切等人的文学和批评作品，以研究经典、文学传统、“影响力焦虑”、全球和白话以及翻译等概念。它从t.s.艾略特的演讲“什么是经典？”的后殖民含义开始。然后继续进行文学案例研究，在这些研究中，经典的问题被提出，经典的精确主张和维度被辩论。不同的章节考察了批评在质疑和维护经典中的作用；（选定的）英国文学经典的历史背景，以及在后殖民时期的复述中如何重新配置；奈保尔和赛义德对康拉德叙事理论的改写英国文学向“英语文学”的转变；莎士比亚在印度电影和舞台上的翻译。我认为，西方经典为后殖民作家提供了一个涌现和客观的场所，在这个场所上，他们与文化定位的关键距离可以成为模型。提议的工作是雄心勃勃和多样化的范围，并提供了现代小说和散文，叙事理论，自传体小说，诗歌，以及后殖民戏剧和电影的多方面的批判性分析。第二章对来自南亚、澳大利亚、非洲和加勒比地区的文学经典外推进行了有价值的概述，其他章节对特定的文学事件进行了深入分析。这本书在国际框架下提出并实践了文学批评，这不仅仅是全球化的必然结果，而且与全球化的同质化冲动背道而驰，即强调地方细节、贫困细节以及新档案的选择和选举的新标准。在世界文学和国际文学批评的新兴领域的背景下，拟议的工作修订了过时的关于经典的学科辩论。本书遵循布伦南、休根和纽曼的领导，定位了后殖民经典及其与全球化框架的关系，但修改了早期作品的中心-边缘模型，以重新想象经典在英语研究中的形成作用，以及它在历史主义实践和文化质疑中的相关性。该项目的一个中心问题是，在我们这个时代，文学批评在阐明非领土化世界（或沿着挑战国家和地区限制的沟通和交流路线组织的世界）的文学审美接受方法中的作用。经典和经典的概念在世界文学的背景下尤为重要，世界文学是一个异质的文学体，它的产生、传播和消费超越了各个民族国家的文化背景。世界文学，包括殖民/后殖民写作以及几千年来的翻译，标志着英语作为一种全球语言的崛起。我认为，即使是这种流通模式，包括经典，以及被欧洲中心经典排除在外的文本，也对永恒文学价值的观念有剩余的兴趣，尽管世界文学是一群不相关文本的流动人口，这一事实使人们有可能想象世界文学的经典不仅仅是一套多样化的价值观（和文本），而是一种不可或缺的文化接触和传播模式。这项研究将在图书馆进行，其中一次将通过采访和与印度莎士比亚协会的互动进行。研究的主要成果是由普林斯顿大学出版社出版的专著。

My monograph, _'What is a Classic?' Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon_, examines singular contestations of literary value in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and Anglophone literature (and literary criticism). The work combines different academic foci - postcolonial, literary historical, and pedagogical - and draws on the literary and critical works of Eliot, Conrad, Naipaul, Said, and Coetzee, among others, to examine ideas of canonicity, literary tradition, 'anxiety of influence,' the global and the vernacular, and translation. It starts with the postcolonial implications of T. S. Eliot's lecture, 'What is a Classic?' and moves on to literary case studies where the question of the classic is staged and the precise claims and dimensions of a classic debated. The different chapters examine the role of criticism in questioning and sustaining the classic; the historical context of (selected) classics of English literature and how this is reconfigured in postcolonial retellings; Naipaul's and Said's rewriting of Conrad's narrative theory; the transformation of English literature to 'literatures in English'; translations of Shakespeare in Indian cinema and on the Indian stage. The Western canon, I argue, affords the postcolonial writer a site of emergence and an impersonality on which their own critical distance from cultural locatedness may be modelled. The proposed work is ambitious and diverse in scope, and offers multi-faceted critical analysis of the modern novel and essay, narrative theory, autobiographical fiction, poetry, and postcolonial theatre and cinema. The second chapter, provides a valuable overview of canonical extrapolations in literature from South Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Caribbean, which the other chapters provide in-depth analysis of particular literary events. The book both proposes and practices literary criticism in an international framework, which is not simply a corollary to globalisation, but works against its homogenising impulse to emphasise local detail, indigent particulars, and new criteria of selection and election for new archives. The proposed work revises outdated disciplinary debates on canonicity in the context of the emergent field of world literature and international literary criticism. If follows the lead of Brennan, Huggan, and Newman in locating the postcolonial canon and its relationship to globalised frameworks, but revises the centre-periphery model of the earlier works to reimagine the formative role of the canon in English studies, and the relevance it has in historicist practice and cultural interrogation. A central concern of the project is the role of literary criticism in our times in articulating methods of aesthetic reception for the literature of a deterritorialised world (or a world that is organised along lines of communication and exchange that challenge national and regional limits). The idea of canons and classics is particularly relevant in the context of world literature, a heterogeneous body of literature that is produced, circulated, and consumed beyond the cultural contexts of individual nation states. World literature, which includes colonial/postcolonial writing alongside translations across millennia, signals the rise of English as a global language. I argue that even this mode of circulation, which includes classics, as well as texts excluded by the Eurocentric canon, has a residual interest in the idea of perennial literary value, though the fact that world literature is a floating population of unrelated texts makes it possible to imagine that the canon of world literature is not merely a rarified set of values (and texts) but an indispensable mode of cultural contact and transmission. The research will be conducted in libraries, and, in one instance through interviews and interaction with the Shakespeare Societyof India. The key outcome of research is a monograph published by Princeton University Press.