English - Publications

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Browsing English - Publications by Author "Chandran, K. Narayana"
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    On english from india: Prepositions to post-positions
    ( 2006-12-01) Chandran, K. Narayana
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    Peripheral pedagogics: Nadine gordimer's “once upon a time”
    ( 2020-01-01) Chandran, K. Narayana
    In this essay, I explore “peripheral pedagogics” the wholly unforeseen ways of fantasizing others, and learning from them, when English situates young Indian readers of Nadine Gordimer's 1989 story, “Once Upon a Time.” While students need little help in noticing the story's realist portrayal of post-Apartheid South Africa, only detailed analysis of crucial passages enables them to appreciate her ironic treatment of folktale clichés and time-worn conventions of children's stories. Reading Gordimer in a course called New Literatures in English, they see how colonial fantasy meets postcolonial forensics in such partnered narratives; how, further, the teller and her tale reflect mutually gothic fear and the monstrous, both indeed emanating from much the same consciousness. The interpretive light Gordimer casts on Homi Bhabha's (1988) “Other Question” and the colonial strategies of othering he discusses in The Location of Culture add to their discovery that clichés are to fiction what stereotypes are to social studies. Rather than asking what stereotypes are, the class here begins to ask what stereotypes are for (and why they return to wake us from deep slumber). The actual circumstances of Gordimer's story are inseparable from its telling. No learning is complete, however, unless the peripheral recognizes that the telling is the story- the one who tells and those to whom it is told share equal opportunity in this learning. Theoretical debates do not count for much if we do not believe that the values we teach are not always at odds with those inherent in such stories as Gordimer's.
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    Reading relations in Paule Marshall's "From the Poets in the Kitchen"
    ( 2017-01-01) Chandran, K. Narayana
    Paule Marshall's essay "From the Poets in the Kitchen" (1983) is exemplary in tracing the progress of the word through the world of a writer sensitive to relations. To such relations all responsible reading commits us as social beings. Marshall's self-reflexive narrative speaks to readers, especially young adults, to make themselves on terms entirely their own, and feel obligation-free amid discriminatory regimes and culturally biased institutions of learning. This article traces a carefully evolved pattern of reading relations in Marshall's recall of locations, beginning especially with the kitchen where her mothers gather to tell tales to regale one another. We have much to learn from this discovery of her writing self in the most unexpected places; her chance to feel happy at happenstance; and above all, the creative evolution of one who turns out to be, again, a writer/teacher who learns from and reports on an unexpected classroom imbroglio. Responding quite earnestly to both storytelling and the epistemic bonds it builds for a raconteuse, Marshall's essay attests to an enabling vision of community that is born of and sustained by communication, a community that realizes itself first of all in a classroom through the emblematic fiction and the figures of life it reads.
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    The Hawthorne aspect of T.S. Eliot's Coriolan allusive journey as errancy
    ( 2007-02-01) Chandran, K. Narayana
    Allusion is generally understood as a textual maneuver that calls into play remembered fragments and transfigured motifs in literature. While pursuing an allusive trail, readers sometimes neglect to consider the detours, certain errant trips a narrative prompts them to make in memory. This essay reads T. S. Eliot's Coriolan fragments alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," both texts featuring young men's errancy and rebellion leading to their respective realities of life. On an allusive trail a reader is a quester; allegory aligns readers and characters in fiction in their common pursuit for the meanings they seek. While parallels, correspondences, and repetitions are remarkable, readers are not always obliged to seek the arresting ground of an empirical "source." The reading here shows how Eliot appears to have reworked a large Hawthornian paradigm involving American colonial history and an individual American's progress in life. It illustrates further how allusion is both a tribute to tradition and a repudiation of its authority, a detail we remark both in Robin and the "hero" of Coriolan fragments. Both Eliot and Hawthorne before him have been, therefore, sensitive to the burden of paternal inheritance, an aspect Eliot's allusive practice in particular makes clear when he draws upon Hawthorne. Eliot's "Hawthorne aspect" thus enables us to see for once the advantage of looking away from a professed allusive lead in the title (Shakespeare's Coriolanus) but towards another paternal link the poet appears to have suppressed (Hawthorne's American tale). © 2007 Blackwell Publishing.
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