Realism and South Asian Literature

Catalog description

This course examines problems of realism as a concept in relation to South Asian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. Realism, both in its broadest sense as mimetic depictions in literature, as well as specific instantiations in art history, literature, and politics, has had a decisive impact on South Asian literary history. Yet as a topic realism presents several unique challenges, not unlike its twin in twentieth-century literature, the equally-protean modernism. In part this may stem from its conceptual and disciplinary range, pulling together problems in the history of science, the politics of art, and aesthetics. With these caveats in mind, we will examine a range of texts, both those specifically dealing with South Asian literature, as well as those considered foundational to understandings of realism at play. Readings in criticism may include Hegel, Marx, Ian Watt, Rabindranath Tagore, Gyorgy Lukacs, Bertold Brecht, Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson, Theodor Adorno Walter Benjamin, Namwar Singh, Ram Vilas Sharma, WReC, Michael Lowy, and Meenakshi Mukherjee, along with fiction and poetry by Nazeer Ahmed, Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Sa'adat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, O.V. Vijayan, and Uday Prakash. We will also discuss, when relevant topics relating to art history and cinema studies. This course will be suitable both for those students who wish to investigate realism in South Asian history, as well as those who want a thorough grounding in the theory and literary historiography of realism more generally.