Possible Areas for Doctoral Research in English Studies

After the recent announcement by the HRD that a PhD will be made mandatory after the year 2021 as minimum eligibility for applying for the post of assistant professor, the number of interested students inquiring with me about possible areas and topics for doing PhD has gone up. I have been regularly blogging about doing research in English studies, the questions of methodology and coming up with a research proposal and many people have found it useful. Please also check out my following blogs: 

i) A Beginners Guide to Doing PhD in English Literature
ii) Choosing a Topic for the Research Project in English Literature
iii) Writing a Research Proposal in English studies
iv) Possible Areas of Research on Translation Studies
v) On Theorizing Indian Literatures and Cultures
vi) Application of Dionyz Durisin's notion of interliterariness to Indian literatures

English studies in India, after the late nineteen eighties, has undergone a paradigm shift by moving away from centrality of the Anglophone literatures (‘English’ literature, ‘American’ Literature and ‘Indian Writing in English’) to a more comparative Indian literatures framework. It moved away from the study of ‘English literature’ to ‘literatures in English’. This shift was propelled by multiple factors like the rise of postcolonial studies, ‘ the crisis in English studies’ debates in India, growth in Indian literatures in English translation,  development of translation studies and the Dalit studies,  as well as substantial incorporation of non-Anglophone critical theory (largely continental) and cultural studies into the English studies curriculum.  It is the same cultural need to contextualize English studies in India and make it relevant to the Indian studies that has given rise to growing emphasis on ‘English Language Teaching’.

 I have been working within this reoriented discipline from the past two decades, and hence my suggestions for the topics and areas for an M. Phil or PhD research comes from comparative Indian literatures framework. These topics and areas also reflect my own understanding of ‘the knowledge gaps’ in research in English studies today, as well as my own personal research interests. Hence, obviously these are not the only areas. I will be blogging more on other areas as well in future.

 A distinction between ‘an area’ and ‘a topic’ needs to be kept in mind. I have offered broad outline of an area, obviously one needs to relate it to specific authors/texts/ languages/ periods to delimit the project. This specific delimitation would be ‘the topic’. I have given examples from my own research and one can come up with any number of parallel ‘topics’ for their own research projects.

1) Hypertextuality and the questions of Digital Archiving of Indian literatures (Bhakti, 19^th century etc), the post-print condition

While digital humanities has made substantial inroads into the western humanities academia, it is yet to make its place in India. However, after the explosion of the internet and massive proliferation of post-print digital data (‘big data’), the nature of knowledge, its production , circulation has undergone a profound change, and it is often compared to the print technology revolution in the early middle period of the previous millennium. Digital humanities as a discipline engages with methodological, epistemological and ontological issues of literary research in the context of this post-print digital universe of discourse. In the west, digital humanities  has often been thought of in terms of ‘ waves’ where the first wave focussed on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure facilitating the shift from ‘ print’ to ‘ digital’ space, the later developments and waves moved towards creating tools for dealing with ‘ born digital texts. Digital humanities in India is still in its nascent stage and will require transferring of massive pre-print, and print era documents into the digital space , hence dealing with the basic issues of OCR, funding and lack of interdisciplinary expertise. One can look up books like Digital_Humanities. eds. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, et al. MIT, 2012 and Understanding Digital Humanities , ed. David Berry , 2012 for more information about digital humanities.

2) Globalization and Literary languages in India

The processes of globalization unleashed during the nineteen nineties have profoundly altered the cultural landscape of India. How literatures in Indian languages engages with the disturbing questions of virtual reality, new corporate capitalism, hybridization of languages, ‘post-truth’ and politics of media manipulation, rise of social media and the questions of digital identity, privacy, freedom of expression, pornography, and new forms of religious fanaticism is a critical domain of research. One can study how literatures produced in Indian languages (bhashas) in the nineteen nineties and the twenty first century comparatively. My own research on contemporary Marathi poetry deals with such questions. How do literatures from other Indian languages engage with, and embody these developments?

Read my write up on 21st century Marathi literature by clicking here

3)  Dalit literatures of the twenty first century

Caste and gender-based discrimination is deeply rooted in Indian society, and finds its expression in literatures. Dalit literatures emerged during the nineteen sixties, primarily in the form of autobiographies and poetry, and are receiving significant attention in the English studies academia. However, most of the texts that are being studied deal with the lives of Dalit writers during the sixties and the eighties. There is a need to focus on the writers who grew up in the nineties and the twenty first centuries (like Meena Kandasamy and S.Chandramohan  in English and Des Raj Kali in Punjabi) in order to understand the nature of their protest and their negotiation of caste-gender discrimination. We need to ask the questions regarding the role of class, corporate capitalism and technology in this negotiation. We need to compare their writings with the Dalit writers of the earlier generations.

4)   World Literature and Modernisms in Indian languages

Though the concept of ‘world literature’ is fairly old, going back to Goethe at least, it was during the nineteen nineties, after globalization, that the concept started being critically rethought by scholars such as Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti and David Damrosch. These scholars went beyond the traditional notion of world literature as body of texts or a canon to underscore the transnational, trans-regional contexts of literary production, consumption and circulation. David Damrosch edited World Literature in Theory (2014) is the key anthology that would serve as an introduction to various deliberations around World Literature.

Indian students may draw upon these critical re-conceptualizations, and look at the phenomenon like modernisms (as distinct from modern or modernity) in Indian literatures other than English. For instance, one can look at the writings of the immensely influential writers-scholars such as Suresh Joshi, Dilip Chitre, Agyeya, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Vilas Sarang  (Read my paper on Vilas Sarang by clicking here) , G.A. Kulkarni , Namdeo Dhasal ( Read my paper on Namdeo Dhasal by clicking here)  and Nirmal Verma ( many of their creative writings are available in English translation)  using the notion of world literature. It will help us to go beyond the stereotypical readings of these works in terms of ‘influences’ or ‘derivativeness’ and ‘inauthenticity’ that is associated with conventional understanding of modernism in India. One can even approach important literary movements of experimentation such as the Theatre of Absurd in various Indian languages using this theoretical approach. 

More specifically, this approach is also helpful in looking at specific seminal authors like Anton Chekhov,  T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Rabindranath Tagore as world literature and their reception in various Indian languages.

Read my paper on Gujarati modernism by clicking here 

My paper on Marathi modernism by clicking here 

5) Reception and the Impact of Poststructuralist, Postmodern Critical Theories on literary criticism in Indian languages (including performative gender studies)

Though English studies have incorporated the continental theories like poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies in its methodology, how have non-English literary studies ‘received’ these theories need to be examined in their cultural and historical contexts.   For instance, critics like Suresh Joshi, Suman Shah, Babu Suthar, Chandrakant Topiwala in Gujarati, Milind Malshe, Gangadhar Patil, Vilas Sarang , M.S. Patil and Harishchandra Thorat in Marathi draw upon these theories  extensively. What is their impact on the bhasha criticism? What does this reception tell us about the historical context and cultural politics underlying literary criticism in the bhashas?

6) Interliterary processes in the post-Independence Indian literatures

Like the notion of ‘world literature’, the notion of ‘interliterariness’ developed by Dionyz Durisin is extremely useful to understand formation of multiple Indian literatures, as it helps us to overcome the notions of ‘ influences’ that perpetuates the influencer-influenced hierarchies and also helps us to understand literatures as processes rather than products. I am grateful to noted Marathi critic late Prof Kimbahune for drawing my attention to this theoretical framework and its use in multilingual Indian context. Dionyz Durisin’s Theory of Literary Comparativistics (1984) is a useful book. One can also look up Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das edited anthology on Comparative Indian Literature for its application in some places. Marian Gallik’s essays on interliterariness and Durisin are helpful.
Check out my own essay on application of the notion of interliterariness to Indian literatures  by clicking here.

Watch my lecture on translation studies and world literature 

7) Rethinking Bhakti literatures and English studies (beyond colonial paradigms of reading bhakti)

Most of the reading precolonial Indian religious literature tend to see it as ‘pan- Indian’ ‘bhakti movement’ and read ‘universal mysticism’ and ‘democratization’ into it. This anachronistic reading of ‘bhakti’ itself was a result of the nineteenth century colonialism and colonial nationalist modernity that projected such modern or quasi-Christian notions derived from the Reformation onto this body of literature. 
My own research on Narsinh Mehta is deeply coloured by this conventional reading of bhakti. However, when I rethink bhakti critically today, I find it more of a sectarian (or rather panthiya or sampradayik) propaganda rather than being a product of any universal mystical community . It will be a good idea to see how these 'bhakti movements’ in various Indian languages are constructed during the colonial period, especially in English. For instance, R.D. Ranade’s book Mysticism in Maharashtra is an influential book of this kind. There is a need to ‘de-romanticize’ bhakti and rethink the relation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in Indian contexts. One also needs to take a second look at the dialogic/conflictual relation between ‘bhakti’ traditions and ‘ Indian Islamic traditions’.

8) Literary Historiography, Pedagogy and the History of literary canonization in Indian languages

Literary historiography in Indian languages began with pedagogical concerns during the late nineteenth century. How did such projects influence creation of literary canons in those languages? How does looking at historical contexts of historiographical writings reflect the changing poetics and politics of literary cultures? For instance, how do historiographical writings during the nineteen seventies and the eighties differ from the colonial projects? How does the historiographical writings of the nineteen nineties differ from those in the seventies or at the turn of the century? What does this difference tell us about literary culture of its times? How are pedagogical and canonizing concerns articulated in literary historiographies?

Watch my lecture on Literary Historiography in Indian vernaculars, Marathi Bhakti and  World literature

9) Anxiety of Influence and the Politics of Canonization in Modern Indian Literatures

Anxiety of Influence is a powerful theory developed by the American critic Harold Bloom that seeks to de-romanticize relationship between creative writers, and hence a very insightful ( non-Eliotian) take on the question of tradition and modernism. How does this quasi-Oedipal conflict between the authors and predecessors play out in literary arenas in India? My own writings of contemporary Marathi poetry highlight this love-hate tension between the influential modernist poets like Arun Kolatkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Dilip Chitre and Vasant Dahake ,and the new generation poets who emerged during the nineteen nineties like Manya Joshi, Hemant Divate, Mangesh N. Kale, Sanjeev Khandekar and Sachin Ketkar. How does this conflict play out in other Indian literatures?

10) Little Magazine movements and the Literary Avant-gardes in Indian literatures

As demonstrated by Benedict Anderson, print capitalism facilitated the imagination of ‘imagined community’ called nation in the context of colonial modernity. The little magazine movements in Indian languages were ‘non-periodical’ very often ephemeral ventures that were non-capitalistic in their orientation and outcomes of deep discontent with the cultural conservatism of the mainstream periodicals. The dissenting, non-conservative, sexually explicit and radical experimentation with cultural forms (including the visual) was articulated on such fringe, ephemeral platforms during the nineteen fifties and the sixties. In fact, important Dalit writing in Indian languages had to find space in the little magazines.   

( Read my paper on i) Marathi literary Avant-garde )

Great amount of such avant-garde modernist writings later on became ‘mainstream’ and even ‘established’ over a period of time. Little magazines in Marathi included magazines of the sixties and the seventies such as ‘a-ba-ka-da-ee’, ‘ aso’, vaacha’ and so on. My own research work in Marathi is on and through the little magazines of the nineteen nineties like Shabdavedh, Saushthav and Abhidhanantar ( Read my article on Abhidhanantar by clicking here)  that defined themselves as continuing the avant-garde tendencies of their precursors as well as expressing the need to reinvent the idiom of poetry and the need to deal with the altered life and cultural landscape transformed by the forces of globalization. They also expressed their discontent with the idiom of the modernist sixties by pointing out what was once anti-establishment had already become established and clichéd. How did the poetics and politics of the little magazines play out in other Indian languages? How do they compare with the little magazine movements in other parts of the world?

One can also examine ' post-print' (non) periodicals ( e.g. Hakara in Marathi) and blogs in other Indian languages and their cultural agendas when the digital promises to shape our imaginations as ' virtual-global communities'.

Mockingbirds, Good Fences, Bad Neighbours, Refugee Mothers and Children: Or Teaching American Literature in the times of Donald Trump

Literature, as Ezra Pound famously said, is news that stays news. Resonance of quote comes freshly alive for me when I am teaching  American texts like To Kill a Mockingbird, “Mending Wall”, and a poem by the Nigerian-born–settled-in-America writer Chinua Achebe titled ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ as part of the core introductory course for the Bachelor of Arts with English honours (at the first year or ‘freshmen’) at my University in Baroda, Gujarat.

Teaching Harper Lee’s celebrated novel (1960) about racism and growing up in the American south in the backdrop of the recent racist violence of Charlottesville and  the Las Vegas shooting made me recall Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic as a book that has not finished saying what it has to say.   Though racial segregation may have been legally dead in America after the Civil Rights Movement –the event that forms the historical background of To Kill a Mockingbird, the racial segregation of the American hearts and minds seem far from deceased. It is precisely this failure of the law to ensure justice that forms the central theme of this novel, the theme that is critical even today, when the far right has drastically resurged in the western society, fifty seven years after the novel was published

Chinua Achebe’s moving poem ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ made students discuss the burning issue of refugees that has so deeply influenced the global politics today, whether it is ‘Brexit’ or Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Multiculturalism as a political ideology of globalization seems to be on a decline and one of the things fueling this decline is the Syrian refugee crisis and the underlying Islamophobia. Unsurprisingly, my students brought up the issue of the Rohingya refugees too. Clearly, the poem published in 1971 in America has not yet finished saying what it had to say 46 years ago. 

                           

The Robert Frost‘s classic “Mending Wall”, published in 1914, too, has not finished saying what it has to say , especially when the current President Donald Trump has come to power promising the Americans to build a wall to wall out Mexican immigrants,  103 years after its publication. The speaker in the poem mischievously wants his farmer neighbor to rethink his traditional wisdom regarding ‘ Good fences make good neighbours’by drawing attention to that  there is ‘ something’ -probably something supernatural ( an elf? ) or even natural ( winter) that doesn’t love the wall. I don’t think I am as good natured as the farmer -speaker in the Frost poem to ask the President-who is not particularly known for his interest in literature unlike his coloured precursor- to even consider the fact that the ‘something’ that doesn’t love a wall is neither an elf nor winter, but history.

It is precisely this question of history and its relation to culture and literature that drove home to me how baseless is the anxiety of globalization as cultural homogenization (or Americanization).  Many of my students, especially from the metropolitan cosmopolitan (and yes upper-caste) background, are brought up regularly consuming wide range of American cultural artifacts: from fashion to popular novels like  Twilight, from the Hollywood films to  American TV series like “ the Game of the  Thrones”, from  American junk food to American social media ( Facebook or Tinder). Or even American English.And yet they could hardly comprehend most of the content on the first two pages of To Kill a Mockingbird. Who are the Southerners? Who was Andrew Jackson and who were the Creeks? What on earth is a ‘Methodist’ and what is a human chattel? They could hardly catch the Lee’s sarcasm regarding how the white families in the South could trace their lineages back to the Battle of Hastings, nor could they get the joke about  how Simon Finch,  Scout’s forefather, was escaping  persecution of the Methodist by “ more liberal” Christians in England. How is Robert Frost’s New England different from Harper Lee’s Alabama?

The displacement and annihilation of the Native American population, the American Revolution, the Civil war, racism , slavery, the Puritans and various Christian denominations, American social and cultural geographies that the first two pages of To Kill a Mockingbird pack are things that are part of shared collective memory of the Americans ended u p acting as a boundary that separates the American cultural text from the non-American readers who regularly consume popular American cultural artifacts. In short, artifacts are not cultures, and as the cultural theorist Yuri Lotman would point out, culture is non-hereditary memory of a group and it is always bounded (dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’).

The myth of globalization as Americanization is unfounded- we may be consuming more and more American artifacts, but the American cultural memory will never replace non-American cultural memories. And I doubt whether globalization can erase the cultural memory of non-American cultures, because as Lotman has pointed out, the cultural memory is not an archive or a library of past events ,but a mechanism embedded in the present and the contemporary that creates the image of the past and projects it backwards.

Reading and teaching literary texts from other cultures, from Lotman’s perspective, would invariably involve translation and translation according to his theory is the primary mechanism of generation of new meanings and information. Reading such American texts in the non-American societies and cultures would result in translation and generation of new information in those cultures. Globalization accelerates the translation and generation of new meanings in other cultures, leading to added dynamism of cultural change in those local cultures. This dynamism will be chaotic and unpredictable, not a simple Americanisation of the  world. 
[Check out my older presentation on American Poetry with reference to the poetry of Dickinson, Frost and Whitman  embedded below]

How to Read Literary Translation

Most of the discussions around translation in India, whether academic or otherwise, seem to be struck in an obsolete paradigm. (Check out my blog on why translation studies)

 It approaches translation from the perspective of practice- it sees translation as something to be DONE, and hence all the repetitive talk about ‘problems of translation’, whether particular translation is possible or not continues inanely.  Not enough discussion about translation from the perspective of theory and methodology is available in the Indian context, i.e. the questions about how to READ/STUDY/RESEARCH translated texts. There are notable exceptions of course. Here I want to discuss the basic questions of how to READ translated texts for the beginners who have just started researching translation studies. (Check out my blog on some possible areas of research on literary translation)

One obvious pitfall while studying translation is being judgmental (normative) , we are obsessed with the questions like whether a particular translation is ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘readable’. Being judgmental closes the door of the inquiry into the great significance of translations, however ‘bad’, as points of entry to the study a particular cultural history.

                  As translation is a decision-making process starting from the choice of the texts/ authors and the direction of translation (e.g. from Gujarati to English or the other way round) to the decisions involving choices of titles, cultural elements, idioms, literary devices and so on, one way of reading translation is to see how the history of target language culture has influenced these decisions.

                  A powerful theoretical tool in translation studies is Andre Levefere’s idea of translation as a kind of ‘refraction’. Translation, according to Lefevere, can be considered as one of the ‘ refractions’ or all forms of rewritings of texts from one language into other , including cinematic, televisions or comic book adaptations of the Mahabharata or The Godfather to critical commentaries, glosses, summaries of the texts in other languages. Critical articles on Baudelaire by the Gujarati critic Suresh Joshi or the Marathi writer Dilip Chitre ‘refract’ Baudelaire for Gujarati and Marathi audience. Once you see translation as ‘refraction’ you situate it within the larger cultural politics of the period and you can see the role it plays and the agenda behind it.

 

                  Translation, like all other ‘refractions’, Lefevere notes are done under certain constraints of translating culture (TL Culture) and the task of reading a translated text is to understand the strategies of translating ( the decisions made by translators) in the context of these constraints.  According to Lefevere these constraints are as follows: i)  the constraint of language  i.e. the verbal structure and texture of the translating language force the translators to make certain choices, ii)  the constraint of poetics i.e. the dominant poetics of the translating culture compel the translator to choose a particular mode of translation (e.g. AK Ramanujan’s choice to translate the oral -performative genre of Bhakti poetry where the word-music is an essential feature into the imagistic -ironic free verse developed by Eliot or William Carlos Williams), iii) the constraint of patronage – for instance the demand to conform to what your publishers want ( or the publisher’s version of what the reader/market wants) or even the state or political patronage ( what the Polit Bureau wants)  and so on. Refractions, Lefevere argues, are basically manipulative and have an agenda of influencing the audience.  Reading translations as refraction helps us to uncover the rich cultural history of the period. Reading multiple translations of the same literary text or author (e.g. Shakespeare, Sharatchandra or Tagore) over a period of time reveals the cultural politics of the period in which these translations were made and help us reconstruct the history of culture.

                  Another significant question while reading translated texts is to consider translation from functional point of view, i.e. asking the questions like what is the role and the function of the translated text in the development of literary tradition. What is the role of translation in inaugurating or consolidating a literary movement (like modernism or Dalit literature)? What role does translation play in establishing a particular poetics or genre (e.g. Romanticism, the Brechtian theatre, or the Theatre of the Absurd, or genre like the sonnet, the ghazals, the short story or the novel. How does translation influence not the author, but poetics and the form? As the term ‘influence’ is a problematic one (creating a hierarchy between the influencer and the influenced), more constructive way of looking at resemblances between literary traditions and cultures is to see them as what Dionyz Durisin terms as ‘interliterary processes’. (Click here to read my blog on application of Durisin's ideas to Indian literatures) 

                  Durisin’s view of literary and cultural phenomena as processes avoids the tendencies to create hierarchies. When we see that the product ‘Chai’ is produced by the process (mixing ingredients like sugar, milk or tea leaves and boiling it) we no longer see chai as being ‘influenced’ by ‘milk’. Hence, if you see the films like Dharmatma or Sarkar as involving the Hollywood ingredients, say the elements of The Godfather, you no longer create a hierarchy between Hollywood and Bollywood.   Hence while exploring the function of translated texts in the translating culture, we are interested in ways in which translation contributes to these ‘interliterary processes’.

(Also check out my blog on Theorizing Indian literatures using semiotics of culture as theoretical framework)

Check out my Video Presentation on  Contemporary Translation theory and Practice

On Theorizing Indian Literatures and Cultures

         As a researcher in Indian literarures, languages and cultures, my interest in Semiotics of Culture as a theoretical framework developed by the scholars of the Tartu- Moscow School of semiotics especially Juri Lotman ( 1922-1993) stems from the fact that it:

I) Sees meaning as being essentially ‘translational’ and ‘culture’ as essentially multilingual  by underscoring the fact that no meaning-making system can exist in isolation or can be autonomous ( in contrast to Saussure) ……this core assumption makes it pertinent to Indian society which is mindbogglingly diverse and multilingual

II) sees literature (printed or oral or performative) as belonging to a expansive category of artistic texts thus going beyond the restrictive and colonial print-centric view of literature ..it can allow us to understand the dialogic and translational exchanges between the printed or oral literary texts and  texts from cinema, paintings, dance or music

III) is of significant theoretical relevance to Comparative Indian Literatures.  The notion of vertical isomorphism of the semiospheres existing in dialogic interactions with each other at multiple levels  allows us to conceptualize a heterogeneous and stochastic ‘Indian semiosphere’ ( and consequently Indian literatures as being generated by the Indian semiosphere)made up of multiple semiospheres like ‘Marathi’ or “Gujarati’ semiospheres and these semiospheres can be conceptualized as being heterogeneous and stochastic in their own right, interacting dialogically with one another, different spaces within and interacting dialogically with cultural traditions and cultural histories that are neither specific to Marathi nor Gujarati (Sanskrit, Prakrit,  Perso-Arabic, European, Chinese, and so on).

The notion of semiosphere can also equip us to describe the cultural mechanisms underlying what Dionyz Durisin terms ' interliterary processes'. 

Similarly one can conceptualize ‘South Asian Semiosphere’ or ‘Asian Semiosphere’ or a Planetary Semiosphere that generates ‘ world literature’.

One can also understand gender, class and caste as semiospheres. 

IV) is a radical model of cultural historiography

 

a) It sees cultural historiography itself as a narrative and translational activity involving retrospective narrative reconstruction (translation) of cultural history (which is primarily unpredictable and irreversible) into the explanatory languages of the present ( e.g Habermasian sociology , Butler’s gender studies, Foucauldian analysis of discourse, governmentality or biopolitics )

b) it is a model of cultural change that highlights  differential and non-linear modes of development of the diverse co-existing meaning-making systems…for instance fashion, food and caste change at differential rates and poetry using the poetics of the 1940s ( the Ravi-Kiran Mandal lyricism ) can co-exist with the poetry using the avant-garde poetics of 60s in Marathi

c) It is a model of cultural change that views mechanisms of cultural change as being primarily ‘translational’….. it views the underlying mechanism in the generation of ‘the new’ as being translational

V) It provides tools and ideas for practical criticism of texts and their contexts

 The notions of semantic tropes, ‘the text-within-text, plot , the idea of symbol as plot-gene, continuous- discrete ( visual to verbal) dialogics and so on.

VI)

 The mainstream academic cultural studies in India due to its excessive reliance on French, American and British theories (which are monolingual, deterministic in orientation) has failed to come to terms with multilingual and chaotic social and cultural realities of India . 

Its lack of  critical self awareness can be seen in the fact that as it criticizes modernity ( with the ideas of nation or science) as being universalist, Euro-centric and elite on the one hand it has no  issues  uncritically accepting  ‘ Critical Theory’ whose roots go back to Frankfurt or Birmingham or Paris as if they are non-universalist, non-Eurocentric and non-elite.

The mainstream academic cultural studies have become reductive as it sees ‘political interpretation’ as the absolute horizon for all interpretation’ (as Jameson puts it)…. and extremely predictable almost conventional.  However the conceptualization of culture in semiotics of culture  subsumes the political as it sees cultural as fundamentally i) heterogeneous ii) asymmetrical iii) chaotically dynamic and iv) constructivist in terms of epistemology and cognition (seeing semiotic systems as ‘modelling’ systems)…in a sense subsumes political to the cultural rather than reduce the cultural to the political.

My Articles using Semiotics of Culture for Indian literatures :
 i) Indian Writing in English
ii) Indian Poetry in English
iii) Namdeo Dhasal and Dalit Literature
iv)  Modern and Modernism in Gujarati
v)  Avant-garde Gujarati literature
vi) Poetics and Politics of Self-translation

References:

Lotman,Juri. Culture and Explosion. Ed. Marina Grishakova. Trans. Wilma Clark.Berlin and New York. Mouton de Gruyter. 2009. 

--- “On the semiosphere.” Translated by Wilma Clark.  Sign Systems Studies 33.1, 2005

---‘ The Text within the Text’ . (1981) Trans. Jerry Leo, Amy Mandelker , PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 3 (May, 1994), pp. 377-384

---“ Technological Progress as a Problem in the Study of Culture”, trans.  Ilana Gomel Poetics Today, Duke University Press Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (winter, 1991), pp. 781-800. 

---Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1990. 

---‘Culture as Collective Intellect And Problems Of Artificial Intelligence’, trans. Ann Shukman, Russian Poetics in Translati0n,  No. 6, 1979, pp 84-96

---‘ The Poetics of Everyday Behaviour in the Eighteenth Century Russian Culture’, Translated by Andrea Beesing from “Poetika bytovogo povedeniia v russkoi kul’ture XVIII veka,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam, no.8 (Tartu, 1977), pp.65-89.

Writing a Research Proposal for English Studies: Some Hints

Coming up with a clear research proposal is the foundation of your research project. The clarity you bring to your research proposal goes a long way in impacting the quality and velocity of your work. Any research proposal is basically a statement and plan of your research project that explains what you want to do, why is it important to do it, and how you propose to do it. The following write-up offers some hints for a beginner who intends to take up a post-MA research project leading up to an M.Phil or a Ph.D in English studies in India. My hints are mainly regarding exploratory, qualitative research in literary studies in an Indian context. English Language Teaching not being my field, my suggestions and observations will come from literary studies.

One of the major difficulties faced by an aspiring researcher while coming up with a sound research proposal is having insufficient clarity about the research question. Many Indian post-graduates approach me asking for what ‘topic’ they should select for their research- or even worse, that they have already found one,  and want me to supervise it. Most of the times these ‘topics’ are dreadfully clichéd, and the researchers often come up with a justification that they selected them because ‘they liked it and are interested in it’. I say, “Good for you that you are interested. I am not.” It is then that they start asking me what topic would be good.  This happens largely because of the ignorance of what research in literary studies is. I suggest the beginner to look up my earlier blog entry ‘A Beginners Guide to Doing A PhD in English’ for help in this regard. In very early stages, one can only decide a broad area of research interest which may tentatively include specific form/s, author/s and literature/s. I suggest that one should go for the area which one can relate to, or appeals to you as a human being, and excite you.

The research question comes from what is called the ‘research gap’, a ‘gap’ in the existing knowledge, an unexplored or an under-explored aspect of the textual archive (the body of texts termed as ‘primary sources’). This gap may be an unexplored or under-explored methodological (or theoretical) angle that one brings in to bear on a canonical archive- as for instance ‘Caste Consciousness in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri’ which deploys ideas and insights from Dalit studies in reading the canonical Indian Writing in English text, or it may be an underexplored textual archive ( primary sources)  using an established theoretical framework -as for example in ‘Postcoloniality and the question of Identity in contemporary Gujarati Poetry’.  Identification of the research gap makes your project specific. (Check out my blog on application of the theory of interliterariness to Indian literature)

It is important to note that I have assumed that after the ‘crisis in English studies’ debate of the late nineteen eighties, English studies in India have moved far beyond the study of ‘English Literature’ or ‘Indian Writing in English’, and have imbibed the spirit of comparative literature ( You can read my entry on Comparative Literature   and Translation Studies in India on this blog)  in being open to literatures in Indian languages (‘bhashas’ as Prof GN Devy terms them) and open to the expanded notion of the text which includes films, popular literatures, visual culture, oral narratives, and popular culture. This makes the research work inevitably interdisciplinary in nature. I am aware that this assumption is not always accepted by many English departments in India. However, this is the assumption I uphold and promote. (Check out my blog on how to read translation)

Identifying the ‘research gap’ and arriving at the research question will automatically lead to ‘why’ and ‘how’ of your research project. Obviously, in trying to locate what is unexplored or underexplored in your domain, you have to find out what is already explored. This demands extensive reading of already existing knowledge (‘secondary sources’) in the particular domain. Mentioning what you have read in your research proposal is often called ‘Review of Literature’. This extensive pre-reading is indispensible in formulating your argument which is the backbone of your research project. The argument begins when you either disagree with prevalent views and ideas about your subject or you start being aware of the limitations of these views. The ‘why’ of your research (rationale/objectives/ justification) emphasizes the underexplored aspects of your subject and the limitations of the already prevalent views. The rationale also underscores the contemporary social relevance of your research project (the scope and significance). It implies that the knowledge that you produce will be useful and contributing for the society that you inhabit by promoting enhanced understanding of itself.  In my personal view, the research projects dealing with languages and cultures of the society we inhabit, the Indian society, have more direct relevance than those dealing with societies and cultures which are distant from us.  (Check out my blog on the possible areas of research in translation studies)

The ‘how’ or the question of ‘method’ of the research project follows logically from ‘what’ and ‘why’ of it. Using Griffin’s distinction between ‘skills, methods and methodology’ (2005), one can say that ‘Postcoloniality and the question of Identity in contemporary Gujarati poetry’ will evidently use exploratory, qualitative methods involving textual analysis and explication. It might include oral interviews, archival methods, and draw upon the methodological frameworks from comparative studies, postcolonial studies, and identity studies. I recommend Research Methods for English Studies (2005) edited by Gabriele Griffin to everyone who want to do research. (Check my blog on Theorizing Indian Literatures for a brief introduction to Semiotics of Culture as methodology)

As I am talking about exploratory and qualitative research in humanities, it is not necessary to talk about ‘hypothesis’ the concept which belongs more accurately in the domain of natural sciences. As MPhil and PhD programs come with their own time-frames in India, it is not very important to talk about them either. Chapterization of the thesis also comes later and need not be laid down or may be mentioned tentatively. The ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ is usually followed by a list of important books and articles (bibliography) you have mentioned in your ‘Review of Literature’ section. You should use the format given by MLA Handbook (8th Edition).

So the outline of your research proposal may be as follows:

I) The Title and the Topic: The discussion of ‘what’ of your project, the research question in specific terms, and a brief introductory background to the author/s, and texts.

II) Rationale (‘why’ is it important): The discussion of the ‘research gap’, ‘Review of Literature’ and its social significance.

III) Methodological (Theoretical) Framework: The discussion of the relevant theoretical concepts and ideas and their justification.

IV)  Bibliography