Most know William Wordsworth’s declaration that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion” but not its addendum, “It takes its root in emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writer Amit Chaudhuri advanced a similar idea at the 10th annual meet of Literary Activism, a symposium on literary studies in collaboration with Ashoka University and University College, London, late last month. “Writers are not just feelers, they are thinkers,” he said, referring to the theme of the meet – The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay – and the historical “eccentricity” of the essay as an art form. By assuming a tone of authority, objectivity and “sociological verifiability” that allow for publication in modern academic journals, he argues, the essay has lost quirks – of autobiography, narrative, metaphor – that marks literary criticism by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, WG Sebald, Robert Walser and Annie Ernaux.
One of the essays presented at the meet was by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, itself an attempt to bend the boundaries of what an academic paper should allow, by paying tribute to the mysterious process by which writers across eras and places have landed up on similar subjects. He links a vast corpus of writing on love and sex: Buddhist poetry about female desire written between the 6th and 3rd century BC; a collection of poems by 1st century Deccan ruler Hala which depicts women sexually dissatisfied with their husbands; the mysticism of 15th century poet Kabir Das; 19th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert; 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; and living writers Vinod Kumar Shukla and Annie Ernaux.
An essay presented by Lara Choksey discusses expertise and its limits, particularly relevant in a world with blurring boundaries between knowledge and its gatekeepers. She discusses a 1970s feud between biologists EO Wilson and CH Waddington in which the latter published a scathing review of the former’s recent book on sociobiology – a field that aims to link Darwinian natural selection to how human societies behave. Waddington argues that Wilson is “running scared” of philosophy and neglects the complex ways in which humans communicate. Choksey adds that Waddington believed Wilson’s real aim to be “(ridding) the world of absurdity”, referring to Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Wilson, meanwhile, wanted this discussion – a sort of ‘peer review’ – to have happened behind closed doors, exasperatingly saying to a journalist friend, “Should I only write about ants?”
Colin Vanderburg turned the discussion to material concerns of how American universities increasingly cutting down on permanent teaching staff in favour of adjunct, increasing administrative paperwork and clamping down on student protests has had an impact on the rich academic arguments needed for literary studies. He refers to scholars such as Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory and IA Richards debating the uses of close reading – a technique that advocates reading a literary work with a focus on language and not its sociopolitical context. He added, “A world in which we can defend or fight about methods is a melancholy blessing. Will there be someone to miss our crisis when it’s gone?”
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