Pencraft International
46 books
The Book of Radical General Semantics, arranged into seven Parts, begins with a new look at the motor of Korzybski’s general semantics-the Structural Differential. Part II introduces Silent Practice-attention to sensory experience-as integral to saner evaluative processes. Silent Practice precedes The Devices of General Semantics (Part III) as it is a skill that facilitates that “fraction of a second psycho-logical delay” intended by the ...
This comprehensive study of the 'makers' of Indian English Literature ranges from the sporadic but landmark Voices of the nineteenth century to the spurting creativity in the post-Rushdie, contemporary scenario. The contributors, unswayed by the increasing threat of publisher-media offensive to appropriate the critical function, firmly adhere to the time-tested tradition of explorations, discriminations, empathy and evaluation. They interrogate inflated ...
Why Fiction Matters explores how we can understand life better through reading fiction. It includes essays from eminent scholars, young academics and people associated with the publishing industry dealing with different and difficult aspects of reading fiction and understanding life. The essays engage with fictional narratives from English, Indian vernacular and global literatures. The anthology upholds the pluralistic scenario of fiction criticism and the ...
This volume of critical essays on Indian literature covers a wide range of genres like novel, short story and poetry and of languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada and Malayalam besides English. Informed by a deep and firsthand awareness of Indian literary trends and texts as well as of contemporary literary theory, these essays revaluate concepts and movements like Modernism, Dalit literature, Nativism, Dalit literature, Nativism and Feminism and ...
This collection of essays honours Prof.Harish Trivedi, by surveying the three fields to which he has made signal contributions- critism of Indian literature, translation, and postcolonial studies. Eminent scholars, some of whom have shaped these fields, look back on the work of a lifetime, and a couple of younger scholars follow in their wake. The interconnectedness of the three fields emerges in some essays, while in others they retain their independent ...
The book addresses aspects relating to theory and practice of translation studies. It delves into issues like translation culture and translating hybrid language texts, identity affirmation/appropriation in translation, the translation scenario in multilingual and monolingual nations, the author as translator and translation of children's literature. The papers explore the translation situation in India and try to establish principles based on pragmatics. ...
Although the title of the book is very general, the theme centers on the Vedic philosophy. The Vedic philosophy has been characterized as religious and dogmatic. No doubt the Vedas contain spiritual hymns; it also contains deep philosophy in its metaphoric maxims. Overall, Vedic literature is deeply entrenched in faith, strong belief in God and creation. In contrast, the empirical science advocates verification and corroboration. Further, science demands ...
In the wake of competing knowledge systems and paradigm shifts in their pedagogy, the essays in this volume variously address the problems afflicting the teaching of humanities today. The contributors examine the philosophical foundations of the humanities both Indian and Western, explore their various pedagogical possibilities, and offer innovative and insightful suggestions. Focussed on the changing/challenging pedagogical situation today this study is the ...
This volume of essays including the two that were earlier published in the prestigious Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press, U.K.) eloquently testifies to Professor V.Y. Kantak’s life-long, scholarly scrutiny into Shakespeare’s latencies. Focussed on the core contours of the art of this outstanding British dramatist such as his characteristic comedy and tragedy, his dramatic design and stage image, his men and women, these essays carry the ...
This volume offers a critique of the problematics involved in the discipline of English Studies in India over the past fifty years. In a closely argued discourse the author constructs and validates his intellectual odyssey in English Studies in terms of an irreversible movement away from the exclusive domain of a literature written in the U.K. to a more inclusive, enriching and composite concept of literature written in English the world over. Jargon-free and ...
Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives presents a wide range of incisive scholarly criticism on the eminent Indian writer's work to date. With an introduction that places Amitav Ghosh in the context of his historical/cultural/social/political times, this anthology brings together both established and new critics in their perceptive grasp of Ghosh's extraordinary oeuvre of fiction, starting from The Circle of Reason (1986) through The Shadow Lines (1988), In an ...
Authors, Texts, Issues by the author of the highly acclaimed Indian Literature: Positions and propositions brings together ten essays concerning major aspects of Indian literature. The essays in the first part examine some of the specific anxieties of contemporary Indian poetry in the context of nation and region, the democratizing and modernizing forces and processes in post-independence Indian literature, and the concept of the diaspora in the context of Indian ...
This volume of selected papers from the Journal of Contemporary Thought of the Forum on Contemporary Theory of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Journal (1991-2000). The papers are organized around the topic of the discipline of English studies: its history, institutional context, transformation, and pedagogical and curricular imperatives. As the discipline is situated within a complex context ...
This volume brings together some of the most recent revaluations of the multifaceted oeuvre of V.S. Naipaul, comprising his novels, short stories, travel writing, historical accounts, and varied essays. Focussed on the author’s creative anxieties and strategies as much as on his provocative discourses on diverse nations, cultures, histories and communities across the globe, its closely critiques most of his major texts. The anthology also explores the extent of ...
This volume surveys the astonishing flowering of Indian Writing in English during the last two decades. After a brief but trenchant analysis of the milieu, it examines the literary productions in the genres of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose. The range of this study is comprehensive, almost encyclopaedic, the style lively and jargon-free, and the critical enquiry perceptive and succinct, followed by an exhaustive bibliography of secondary sources. ...
Steering clear of the limiting and self-gratifying ‘influence studies’ in literature which Rene Wellek dismissed as ‘cultural book-keeping’ about the influencing and influenced nations, this study makes for a wide-ranging exploration of different literatures and literary texts in terms of their affinities and diversities, ambivalences and appropriations, as also their cross-cultural, ...
The essays included in this volume are critical interventions in the ongoing debate on the notion of modernity and its impact on various academic disciplines. The issues they address have wide-ranging implications for both theory and praxis in the areas of, for instance, democracy, literary education, painting and architecture, generative linguistics, ethnic discourse, colonial and postcolonial literatures, regimes of science, and historicism. Each contributor to ...
This book (re) constructs some of the major poetic personalities of not too distant a past, and of different cultures and nations: Tagore, Whitman, Yeats, and Eliot, from the pages of their books of poems. Maintaining a clear distinction between the real self as biographically constructed and the poetic self as constituted in the poetic text, the author reads the silent and implicit narrative that connects poem to poem. He reconciles the autobiographical act and ...
This anthology brings together most of the major poets of twentieth century Canada. It affirms the distinctness of the felt and lived experience of these poets, often captured in innovative language and experimental modes of writing. At the same time, the plurality of their voices strongly reflects their situative anxieties in a land of cultural mosaic, restricted history, ethnic co-existence and other differential features. The poems, marked by intensity and ...
First published in 1971, this study of the Indian novel in English has remained a seminal book for the last three decades. This was the earliest work to apply rigorous standards of critical analysis to this new field of study and to situate the novels studied in their historical and social context. Written in an elegant and jargon-free language The Twice Born Fiction laid the foundations for future discourse in this field and anticipated some of the issues ...
How well has A Passage to India worn? This critical anthology responds by putting together postcolonial, feminist, liberal and several other voices of today which talk to each other and talk across each other to the text. The volume interrogates afresh the major characters of the text, polarities between Hinduism and Islam, myths and possibilities of cross-cultural friendships, muddle and mystery of the rape, cultural paradigms of the colony and the empire, and ...
This volume, dedicated to the theme of “rethinking modernity†of the Jaipur Conference (2003) of the Forum on Contemporary Theory, looks back on the Western project of modernity and its transformation through ages from multi-disciplinary perspectives. As an identity-marker of the West, the idea of modernity continues to excite and provoke literary scholars, philosophers, political theorists, social critics and art historians in strangely ambivalent ways. The ...
This volume both interrogates and celebrate the outstanding achievement of Girish Karnad as a dramatist, engaged in reinventing the Indian theatre traditions over the past forty-five years. Jargon-free and insightful, the book probes Karnad’s inclusive dramaturgy manifested in his deft handling of various literary tropes and stage props. All major plays of the distinguished dramatist are explored and revaluated in their larger socio-cultural, historical, ...