Gaurav Majumdar - Böcker

Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900 - 1940 is the first study of informality in modernist literature. Differentiating informality from intimacy in its introduction, the book discusses the informal in relation with sensory experience, aesthetic presentation, ethical deliberation or action, and social attitudes within modernist works. It examines these works for particular nuances of the word "informality" in each of its chapters in the following thematic sequence: informality that offers humour, interpretive freedom, and promiscuity as counters to self-absorption in works by Virginia Woolf; rebuttals to male priorities in liberalism through "feminine informality" in several short stories by Katherine Mansfield; contempt for colloquialism and intimacy, tinged with class-anxieties and crises of attitude, in T. S. Eliot’s poetry; resistance to disgust in James Joyce’s novels; and the fusion of irreverence, protest, and praise in W. H. Auden’s writings before 1940. The book’s conclusion considers the risks of informality through a discussion of what it calls "inverted dignity." The theoretical aspects of the book offer insights into Lockean liberalism, the ethical dimensions of what Hélène Cixous termed "feminine writing," relations of sublimity and domesticity, Sigmund Freud’s arguments on humour and melancholia, and recent affect theory’s—as well as Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s—views on disgust, linking these with modernism. This wide range of engagement makes this study relevant for those interested in literary studies, critical theory, and philosophy.

Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900 - 1940 is the first study of informality in modernist literature. Differentiating informality from intimacy in its introduction, the book discusses the informal in relation with sensory experience, aesthetic presentation, ethical deliberation or action, and social attitudes within modernist works. It examines these works for particular nuances of the word "informality" in each of its chapters in the following thematic sequence: informality that offers humour, interpretive freedom, and promiscuity as counters to self-absorption in works by Virginia Woolf; rebuttals to male priorities in liberalism through "feminine informality" in several short stories by Katherine Mansfield; contempt for colloquialism and intimacy, tinged with class-anxieties and crises of attitude, in T. S. Eliot’s poetry; resistance to disgust in James Joyce’s novels; and the fusion of irreverence, protest, and praise in W. H. Auden’s writings before 1940. The book’s conclusion considers the risks of informality through a discussion of what it calls "inverted dignity." The theoretical aspects of the book offer insights into Lockean liberalism, the ethical dimensions of what Hélène Cixous termed "feminine writing," relations of sublimity and domesticity, Sigmund Freud’s arguments on humour and melancholia, and recent affect theory’s—as well as Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s—views on disgust, linking these with modernism. This wide range of engagement makes this study relevant for those interested in literary studies, critical theory, and philosophy.

Migrant Form examines the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Satyajit Ray for the anti-colonial arguments in their unsettled, and unsettling, aesthetics. Among the questions it engages are the following: What are the aesthetic moves through which art expresses its resistance to dominance and demands for conformity? How can we define anti-colonial aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different media such as literature and film? Contending that Joyce inaugurates an anti-colonial «aesthetics of reconstitution», the book mines such aesthetics in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to propose a formal model for postcolonialism. It also draws on that exercise to consider how Rushdie extends a play with reconfigured forms into an overt politics in two of his novels (Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses). Turning its attention to film, the book contests the common view of Ray as a gentle realist and examines a formal restlessness in Ray’s earlier work, Charulata (The Lonely Wife), before demonstrating how Ray stages his preference for restlessness in his final film, Agantuk (The Stranger).

This book aims to understand the inherent circadian cycles of biological processes and their role in maintaining health and healing a variety of diseases.

This book aims to understand the inherent circadian cycles of biological processes and their role in maintaining health and healing a variety of diseases. The book is divided into eight sections. The first section introduces circadian rhythms and aging. The second section focuses on the detailed mechanistic approach of oscillatory pathways in mammals. The next section summarizes the sensitivity of the biological clock towards light and the circadian response to melatonin in mammals. The fourth section addresses the circadian architecture at the cellular level and introduces an age-dependent experimental model of rodents for subsequent biochemical and molecular investigations. The subsequent section covers the complexity of circadian regulation in mitochondrial dynamics and its impact on aging. The sixth section of the book discusses the findings obtained from different experimental approaches as a critical threat to the functioning of clock regulatory mechanisms and its associated health consequences during aging in humans and animal models. The circadian oscillatory mechanisms that are dysregulated and might play an important role in the development and progression of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Huntington’s Disease (HD), and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), etc are discussed in the next section. Towards the end, the book explores the circadian clock as a possible drug target to restore circadian oscillations.