In this chapter, Ghosh theorizes the ethics of sahitya from three aspects. He explains what he means by aesthetics of hunger and then shows how theory and emotion are connected. Ghosh demonstrates the ethics and politics of hunger through a close study of Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” and develops his arguments on the philosophy of the other. This poetics of sahit (togetherness) leads to the second section of the chapter, which speaks about the nonhuman matter contributing to the making or materialization of sahitya: the philosophy of matter or thing-force, how the material changes from its state of being a thing (nonhuman) to share in the materiality of sahitya, and how the thingness or “thingification” of sahitya can be related to its ethical status. The third section of the chapter is about the postaesthetic of sahitya. Working through object-oriented ontology, principles of nonconnection, and what Ghosh calls the “becoming aesthetic,” the chapter demonstrates how ethics of literature can also emerge from a pretheoretical state. The phenomenon of the becoming aesthetic is a bargaining power that is supposedly lost on literature in the compulsive duress of interpretation, methodological stridency, and astuteness. The ethics of sahitya can thus be built through the aesthetic, neomaterialist, and postaesthetic principles of hunger.
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Contents
Thinking Literature across Continents
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently,
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently,
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently,
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently,
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