Thinking Literature Across Continents

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently, Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet: From Philip Sidney to T. S. Eliot.J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently, An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.

• Preface / J. HIllis Miller  viiAcknowledgments / Ranjan Ghosh  ixAcknowledgments / J. Hillis Miller  xiIntroduction: Thinking across Continents / Ranjan Ghosh  1Introduction Continued: The Idiosyncrasy of the Literary Test / J. Hillis Miller  9Part I: The Matter and Mattering of Literature1. Making Sahitya Matter / Ranjan Ghosh2. Literature Matters Today / J. Hillis MillerPart II: Poem and Poetry3. The Story of a Poem / Ranjan Ghosh  714. Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens's "The Motive for Metaphor" / J. Hillis Miller  93Part III: Literature and the World5. More than Global / Ranjan Ghosh  1116. Globalization and World Literature / J. Hillis Miller  134Part IV: Teaching Literature7. Reinventing the Teaching Machine: Looking for a Text in an Indian Classroom / Ranjan Ghosh  1558. Should We Read or Teach Literature Now? / J. Hillis Miller  177Part V: Ethics and Literature9. The Ethics of Reading Sahitya / Ranjan Ghosh  20710. Literature and Ethics: Truth and Lie in Framley Parsonage / J. Hillis Miller  232Epilogue / Ranjan Ghosh  259Notes  263Bibliography  291Index  307

"As Ghosh makes a gesture to develop a new sense of universal literature, one that infuses both Western and developing world literary traditions and histories, Miller reflects on the impact of deconstruction and the dominance of new media in Western culture and society, and provides some redemptive values of literature. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - Y. Shu (Choice) "Immensely knowledgeable and thought-provoking." - Susana Onega (CounterText) "The focus of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s ambitious, distinctive, and highly engaging book Thinking Literature across Continents is nothing less than the world (the meaning of 'the world' and what is happening to it, above all from the perspective of people involved in education, whether teaching or being taught), together with that seemingly familiar yet peculiar, elusive thing called literature." - Nicholas Royle (Comparative Literature Studies) "The highest appeal of the volume lies in their recourse to supposedly incommensurable discursive and artistic practices. Each issue at the core of the five parts of the book is treated back to back by Ghosh and Miller, with a laudable desire to engage in some ways of exchange." - Laurent Dubreuil (Comparative Literature Studies)