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In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national
culture was bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time
and experiments of the twentieth-century novel. Today, the
constructs of both novel and a progressivist national project
function, in all their closures, within global scales of economic
disparity and violent exclusion. What is the fate of a literary
canon when it is no longer capable of delineating a future - or
otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past within
its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current "globalist"
moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity
emerge in a text's inability to speak on time? When does artistic
or literary failure become the measure of a work's accomplishment?
And what sort of liberation is envisioned by works that refuse the
imperatives of "progress" and "independence" - which embrace the
appearance of obsolescence by rejecting values of artistic freedom,
originality and innovation? These are some of the provocations that
arise from T.W. Adorno's idea of late style for our own conjuncture
- a properly postcolonial context, in which every conceptual or
expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of eroded
national promise. Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj
Anand, Vikram Seth and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy
examines the delayed claims of literary and artistic modernity in
India through Adorno's category of late-style. In striking readings
of Adorno and his interlocuters, the book extends a poetics of
lateness toward a speculative history of the twentieth-century
novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from
the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late
Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced
capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel's foundational
reference point in the nation to produce altered frames of thought
and sensibility - and therein, a reader who might encounter, anew,
the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century.
In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national
culture was bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time
and experiments of the twentieth-century novel. Today, the
constructs of both novel and a progressivist national project
function, in all their closures, within global scales of economic
disparity and violent exclusion. What is the fate of a literary
canon when it is no longer capable of delineating a future - or
otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past within
its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current "globalist"
moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity
emerge in a text's inability to speak on time? When does artistic
or literary failure become the measure of a work's accomplishment?
And what sort of liberation is envisioned by works that refuse the
imperatives of "progress" and "independence" - which embrace the
appearance of obsolescence by rejecting values of artistic freedom,
originality and innovation? These are some of the provocations that
arise from T.W. Adorno's idea of late style for our own conjuncture
- a properly postcolonial context, in which every conceptual or
expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of eroded
national promise. Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj
Anand, Vikram Seth and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy
examines the delayed claims of literary and artistic modernity in
India through Adorno's category of late-style. In striking readings
of Adorno and his interlocuters, the book extends a poetics of
lateness toward a speculative history of the twentieth-century
novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from
the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late
Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced
capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel's foundational
reference point in the nation to produce altered frames of thought
and sensibility - and therein, a reader who might encounter, anew,
the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century.
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