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.