Time, Doubt and Wonder in the Humanities: Between the Tick and the Tock

Description

Time, Doubt and Wonder in the Humanities addresses a serious lacuna in humanities studies. It affirms our commitment to wonder and adventure in living by confronting the subtext that lies within the manifold worldly, social and political vicissitudes and tribulations. The essays in this volume speak to our times and make sense of the idea of temporality in general by using wonder as an inclusive metaphor, which engulfs fortitude, anguish, joy, providence, submission, precariousness and revulsion. Wonder could lead to curiosity to inspiration to doubt to questioning to indignation to seeking of justice. The book offers a benchmark in thinking about why we must take literature and art seriously in times of great political turmoil. It affirms that the shape and contour of literary studies shall depend on how the coming generation maintains a delicate balance among inspiration, doubt and faith.

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi and the editor of the web-journal humanitiesunderground.org. His most recent work is The Opulence of Existence, Essays on Aesthetics and Politics (2016)-a set of essays on literary forms and the current political predicament. His other works include Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (2006) which deals with early modern radical culture and an edited volume on contemporary writings on humanities titled Shrapnel Minima, Writings from Humanities Underground (2014). Chakravarty nurtures a particular interest in poetry and poetics and enjoys translating significant contemporary literary writings into English.

Dazzling, erudite, simultaneously charming and assaulting, this analysis of affects, disturbing and strange affects, and especially wonder, the most elusive of affects and the most energising of moods, shines a new light on the forces of time and becoming. At once a deeply political analysis of the present and a meditation of its impossibility, these extraordinary essays open out our understanding of what the humanities, and especially the arts, can do in times of crisis. -- Elizabeth Grosz * Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University * Anyone demoralised about the situation of humanities in an anti-intellectual and greed-driven era will be heartened by this path-breaking and searching study. Prasanta Chakravarty has gathered here essays on topics that range from the importance of Luther to the Torah as literature to 18th-century minstrelsy. His meditations on such historical topics are interwoven with readings of important Bengali and Hindi poets of several generations, new insights into the poems of Basil Bunting and David Jones, and thoughts on the quality of academic life within the University of Delhi, where he teaches. Underlying all of his work is a concern with the common human experiences of time and the senses, and the ways our belief systems, so often mutually unintelligible, which nevertheless speak to a shared desire to live beyond the merely literal. -- Susan Stewart * Poet and Avalon Foundation University Professor of Humanities, Princeton University * Prasanta Chakravarty's book is a furious, irresistible ride between philosophy, literature and politics. It displays an amazing erudition and mobilises dozens of ideas and authors, from classics to contemporary critical thought, passing through German, English and Hindi poetry. Advancing through this labyrinth of concepts and images with elegance and astuteness, Chakravarty explores the enigma of time. Between Chronos and Kairos, his praxical imagination fruitfully discloses new horizons of hope. -- Enzo Traverso * Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University *