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

我的专著《什么是经典？“后殖民重写和发明的佳能_，研究奇异的文学价值在二十和二十一世纪世纪英国和英语文学（和文学批评）的立场。这部作品结合了不同的学术焦点--后殖民、文学史和教育学--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，以考察经典性、文学传统、“影响的焦虑”、全球和本土以及翻译等思想。首先从T. S.艾略特的演讲，“什么是经典？然后进入文学案例研究，在那里经典的问题被上演，经典的确切主张和维度被辩论。不同的章节研究批评在质疑和维持经典的作用;（选定）英国文学经典的历史背景，这是如何在后殖民复述重新配置;奈保尔和赛义德的康拉德的叙事理论重写;英语文学的转变为“英语文学”;莎士比亚在印度电影和印度舞台上的翻译。我认为，西方经典为后殖民作家提供了一个出现的场所和一个非人格化的场所，他们自己与文化定位的批判距离可以以此为模型。拟议的工作是雄心勃勃的，范围多样，并提供现代小说和散文，叙事理论，自传体小说，诗歌，后殖民戏剧和电影的多方面的批判性分析。第二章，提供了一个有价值的概述规范外推文学从南亚，澳大利亚，非洲和加勒比地区，其中其他章节提供了深入的分析特定的文学事件。这本书在国际框架内提出并实践了文学批评，这不仅仅是全球化的必然结果，而是反对其强调地方细节、贫困细节以及新档案选择和选举的新标准的同质化冲动。拟议的工作修订过时的学科辩论规范的背景下，新兴的世界文学和国际文学批评领域。如果遵循布伦南，Huggan，和纽曼在定位后殖民正典及其与全球化框架的关系的领导，但修改了早期作品的中心-外围模型，重新想象正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审讯的相关性。该项目的一个核心问题是文学批评在我们这个时代的作用，阐明了一个非地域化世界（或一个沿着沿着挑战国家和地区限制的沟通和交流路线组织的世界）的文学的审美接受方法。经典和经典的概念在世界文学的背景下尤其相关，世界文学是一种异质的文学，其生产，流通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/后殖民写作以及跨越千年的翻译，标志着英语作为全球语言的崛起。我认为，即使是这种流通模式，其中包括经典，以及文本排除了欧洲中心的佳能，有一个剩余的兴趣，在思想的常年文学价值，尽管世界文学是由互不相关的文本组成的流动人口这一事实使我们有可能想象世界文学的经典不仅仅是一套稀有的价值观（和文本），而是一种不可或缺的文化接触和传播方式。研究将在图书馆进行，并在一个例子中，通过采访和与印度莎士比亚协会的互动。研究的主要成果是普林斯顿大学出版社出版的一本专著。

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.