Heyman Center Common Room
Global Cultural Studies
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
A recording of this event can be found here.
Registration is required, and can be found here. Registration does not confirm a seat will be available; seating will be first-come, first-serve. This event is organized by Global Cultural Studies, and cosponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Allegory, Violence, and Literature in our Time
Supriya Chaudhuri
Abstract
The resurgence of theoretical interest in allegory, whether as symbolic mode or as literary genre, has also prompted enquiry into the conditions under which allegory becomes a necessary form of expression. What kinds of meaning are produced by allegory, and what is its relation to time and to history? This presentation begins by looking at a little-known Bengali allegorical poem from the 19th century, described by its publisher as a sāj-rūpak kābya, with the claim there was no exact equivalent in either Bengali or Sanskrit for the term “allegory.” It goes on to examine the allegorical impulse in the literature of our modernity, commenting in passing on Fredric Jameson’s observations (1981, 1986, 2019) but focusing especially on modernist and postmodernist dystopias, and upon the relation of theoretical and historical violence.
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, India. Her research interests include early modern English and European literature, Indian cultural history, modernism, theory, cinema, sport and urban studies. Among recent publications are her edited books, Religion and the City in India (2022) and Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2018); as well as articles in Spenser Studies (2023), BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (2023), Thesis 11 and Postcolonial Studies (2021); and chapters in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (2023), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (2023), The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures (2022), Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, Literature (2022); and The Cambridge Companion to Tagore (2020).
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for accessibility needs.
