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Society and Literature:
Interdisciplinary Transactions
Seminar on
Society and Literature: Interdisciplinary Transactions
In Collaboration with ICSSR, NERC,Shillong, at Shillong
(16-18 March 2010)
Literature thrives on two very important
functions-the representational and the hermeneutic
both of which in turn derive their essence from society and
the social construction of reality. Realism, which has been
a key concept in literary production has undergone significant
changes based on the variations in the perception and lived
experiences of the real, of a self in its
relationship to society. From a limited understanding of this
term as everyday reality (bourgeoise realism), there has been
a shift to an understanding of psychological and social realism
based on the self’s affiliation to societal realities
and ideological engagements. Therefore, the intimate connection
between literature and society is genetic and epiphanic. It
is genetic in the sense of society being an originary cultural
and historical source of creative subjectivity. It is also
characterized as an accumulation of various routes of imagination
that can produce an aesthetically sublime and fictional stratum
of narrative signification. It is simultaneously liminal and
evanescent as society illuminates and provides representational
subjects to the metaphoric and organic fabrications of language.
Disciplinary transactions begin at the moment of critical
dialogue between society and its subjects of representation,
i.e. the text and the world.
According to Edward Said
The organized study of literature... is premised on the constitutively
primary act of literary (that is artistic) representation,
which in turn absorbs and incorporates other realms, other
representations secondary to it. But all this institutional
weight has precluded a sustained, systematic examination of
the coexistence of and interrelationship between the literary
and the social, which is where representation-from journalism,
to political struggle, to economic production and power-plays
an extraordinarily important role. Confined to the study of
one representational complex, literary critics accept and
paradoxically ignore the lines drawn around what they do.
(From ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’,
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster p 153-156)
Here, Said is particularly critical of a depoliticization
of literary production by severing it of its connection with
life and society. The institutionalization of literary studies
has created a further gap between production of knowledge
and the production of culture alienating the discipline from
the subject to whom it belongs. Thus
this seminar proposes to examine the link between society
and literature from an interdisciplinary perspective.
The variations in the
use of critical language in humanities and its allied
disciplines is particularly interesting to note. Language
in Literature are put to the service of ‘literary imagination’
which is most often termed as ‘political’ or ‘sociological’.
Correspondingly, fictional and poetic presentations of textual,
intertextual and intersubjective ‘forms’ of reality
alter sensibilities about society, as the self-reflexive creator
produces a no-second version of her political and sociological
imagination. The interplay between literature and society
reaches its summum bonnum as it generates a sense
of lack or plentitude in the minds of connosieurs in terms
of limits of ones imagination, which is supposed to be the
limits of language and literature. These limits are constantly
overcome by a joint affectation between literature and society
in order to arrive at a sense of the ‘sublime’,
which is always beyond but about which there is a creative
yearning in language.
This creative yearning for the call of the beyond is both
historical and trans-historical. The dominant narratives of
History and other Social and Natural Sciences
are being interrogated on the basis of literary narratives
which demystify canonical stereotypes in these disciplines.
Again, the complex relationship between the self,
memory and forgetting of an event vis-a-vis a historical documentation
of a collective experience done on the basis of empirical
data collection is reflected through a sociological imagination
of the literary text which provides a space for a deconstructive
reading of both society and literature. Such a practice does
not simply negate society and literature as opposites, either
in antithesis or in dialectical overcoming but explores new
possibilities of ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’.
It is not only about the literary figures and philosophers,
but one might as well ask about the psychologists, historians,
and social scientists who study the links between society
and Literature. The idea of creativity in literature according
to psychologists like Carl Jung is not an individual
activity but a product of the ‘collective unconscious’
which makes the artist larger than an individual, to a collective
man. This makes creativity a social activity particularly
when an artist attempts to represent a society or a
people. Mainstream research in humanities and Social sciences,
which try to established a logical and heuristic connection
between society and literature in the form of disciplinary
norms and competitive structures of research needs to open
up a dialogic space for intellectual encounter and interdisciplinary
transactions. Homogenization of knowledge and knowledge systems
through specialization is a matter of great concern for researchers
across humanities and all other disciplines in Human Sciences
which want to decentre knowledge claims of researchers in
their institutional ghettos. Late twentieth-century
universities, overemphasize the production of "mini-me"
academics who ignore their own proclivities in favour of pre-professional
training and "sky-high" theory .Forgetting the liberal
arts tradition, produces students who read only the latest
journal articles by the hippest theorists or those who are
conditioned to expect a "fee-for-credit educational service
industry that sells 'McNuggets' of knowledge. The situation
calls for a different and yet a revisionary look at the established
academic practices connecting society and literature. An intellectual
critique oriented to concrete social realties such as issues
of marginality, aesthetic and representation in terms of classes,
races, castes, tribes and other such categories of understanding
need to be carried out with a spirit of academic interrogation.
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