Laetitia Zecchini – författare

In this first scholarly work on India's great modern poet, Laetitia Zecchini outlines a story of literary modernism in India and discusses the traditions, figures and events that inspired and defined Arun Kolatkar. Based on an impressive range of archival and unpublished material, this book also aims at moving lines of accepted genealogies of modernism and ‘postcolonial literature’.Zecchini uncovers how poets of Kolatkar’s generation became modern Indian writers while tracing a lineage to medieval oral traditions. She considers how literary bilingualism allowed Kolatkar to blur the boundaries between Marathi and English, ‘Indian’ and ‘Western sources; how he used his outsider position to privilege the quotidian and minor and revived the spirit of popular devotion. Graphic artist, poet and songwriter, storyteller of Bombay and world history, poet in Marathi, in English and in ‘Americanese’, non-committal and deeply political, Kolatkar made lines wobble and treasured impermanence. Steeped in world literature, in European avant-garde poetry, American pop and folk culture, in a ‘little magazine’ Bombay bohemia and a specific Marathi ethos, Kolatkar makes for a fascinating subject to explore and explain the story of modernism in India.This book has received support from the labex TransferS: http://transfers.ens.fr/

In this first scholarly work on India's great modern poet, Laetitia Zecchini outlines a story of literary modernism in India and discusses the traditions, figures and events that inspired and defined Arun Kolatkar. Based on an impressive range of archival and unpublished material, this book also aims at moving lines of accepted genealogies of modernism and ‘postcolonial literature’.Zecchini uncovers how poets of Kolatkar’s generation became modern Indian writers while tracing a lineage to medieval oral traditions. She considers how literary bilingualism allowed Kolatkar to blur the boundaries between Marathi and English, ‘Indian’ and ‘Western sources; how he used his outsider position to privilege the quotidian and minor and revived the spirit of popular devotion. Graphic artist, poet and songwriter, storyteller of Bombay and world history, poet in Marathi, in English and in ‘Americanese’, non-committal and deeply political, Kolatkar made lines wobble and treasured impermanence. Steeped in world literature, in European avant-garde poetry, American pop and folk culture, in a ‘little magazine’ Bombay bohemia and a specific Marathi ethos, Kolatkar makes for a fascinating subject to explore and explain the story of modernism in India.This book has received support from the labex TransferS: http://transfers.ens.fr/

Literary Activism – activism that revisits and interrogates an idea of literature – emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia, where market pressures are effecting changes – on language, on the measuring of value, on the concept of influence – we might struggle to recognise.Taking in the roles of writer, critic, translator, academic and publisher, the essays in this volume follow no single line of enquiry. Rather, they offer the beginnings of an analysis of the literary world at a certain moment of globalization, while also questioning whether a literary world exists and, if it does, where its boundaries lie.The collection moves in many directions – from Arun Kolatkar and his near-heroic refusal of both market place and reputation; to Derek Attridge, who argues for a form of affirmative criticism which positions the critic as a ‘lover of the text’; while, from Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić;reflects on life in a literary ‘out of nation zone’, adrift in a territory where intellectual protest has been stripped of ideological impetus and subsumed by the voraciousness of the market.Taken together, these essays initiate a series of conversations about who reads what and why, about the practice of writing and criticism at this particular contemporary moment, and about the activities and institutions that shape an understanding of what literature is and what it can do.Literary Activism, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, features writing from Derek Attridge, Tim Parks, Dubravka Ugrešić, Laetitia Zecchini, Peter D. Macdonald, Saikat Majumdar, Jamie McKendrick, and Swapan Chakravorty, with an afterword byJon Cook.