Critic as Amateur

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He is the author of numerous books, including Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (2013), College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), and the novel The Scent of God (2019).Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, USA. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2016 (2016), winner of the 2018 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: “Criticism for the Whole Person”Aarthi Vadde (Duke University, USA) with Saikat Majumdar (Ashoka University, India)Part I: THE AMATEUR IMPULSE1. In Praise of AmateurismDerek Attridge (University of York, UK)2. In the Shadow of the ArchiveTom Lutz (Founder and Editor of Los Angeles Review of Books)3. "It’s All Very Suggestive, but It Isn’t Scholarship"Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (University of Arizona, USA)4. Beyond Professionalism: The Pasts and Futures of Creative CriticismPeter D. McDonald (Oxford University, UK)Part II: THE AMATEUR IN THE AGE OF PROFESSIONALIZATION5. Leavis, Richards, and the DuplicatorsChristopher Hilliard (University of Sydney, Australia)6. The Critic as Rasik: Pramatha Chaudhuri, Tagore, and the New Language of Literary Writing Rosinka Chaudhuri (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India)7. The Sophisticated Amateur: Vernon Lee versus the Vital LiarsMimi Winick (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA)Part III: THE CRITIC AS AMATEUR IN OLD AND NEW MEDIA8. Dorothy Richardson and Close Up: Amateur and Professional Exchanges in Film CultureZlatina Nikolova & Chris Townsend (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)9. New Judgments: Literary Criticism on AirEmily C. Bloom (Columbia University, USA)10. The Small Press and the Feminist CriticMelanie Micir (Washington University in St. Louis, USA)EPILOGUE: New, Interesting, and Original: The Undergraduate as AmateurKara Wittman (Pomona College, USA)List of ContributorsBibliographyIndex

This splendid, exhaustively researched, and timely collection—buoyed by the editors’ equally comprehensive introduction and a contrapuntal pedagogical epilogue on New, Interesting, and Original: The Undergraduate as Amateur—is substantial in developing its arguments.