Brown Bag Discussion on Pollock's Literary Cultures in History

This will be an informal discussion among South Asia faculty and students, a continuation of the dialog initiated by our discussion in Autumn 2005 on Ron Inden's methodology for textual interpretation. The focus of the present discussion is the collection of essays edited by Sheldon Pollock in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia.  The scope of this collection is quite broad, with essays on the literature and literary cultures in Sanskrit, Persian, "Indian-English," Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Sindhi, Pali, Tibetan, Sinhala, Urdu & Hindi. (See the Table of Contents).  The discussion will be structured around a reading of Pollock's Introduction to this collection.

Readings

• Table of Contents, Contributors, to Pollock, Sheldon, ed. (2003), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, pp. ix-x, xii-xiv. Berkely: University of California Press.
• Introduction, by Sheldon Pollock, in Pollock, Sheldon, ed. (2003), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, pp. 1-36. Berkely: University of California Press.
  

• Review by King, Robert D. (2004), Univ. of Texas at Austin in Libraries & Culture, 39:335-6.
• Review by Perry, John Oliver. (2005), Seattle WA in World Literature Today, 79:86-7.