Supriya Chaudhuri delivered the 25th B. N. Ganguli Memorial Lecture on ‘Allegory, History, and Literature between Past and Future’. It was chaired by Baidik Bhattacharya.
ZOOM ID: 84537642740 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
B. N. Ganguli Memorial Lectures are held in memory of the distinguished economist Professor B. N. Ganguli, former Chairman, CSDS Board of Governors. Earlier speakers in the series include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claudio Lomnitz, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Sari Nusseibeh, Leela Gandhi, Lila Abu-Lughod, Francesca Orsini, Janaki Nair and Isabel Hofmeyr.
This year’s lecture will be delivered by Supriya Chaudhuri.
What kinds of meaning are produced by allegory, and what is its relation to history, to the task of representation, and to literature’s positioning between past and future? This lecture will examine allegory and allegorical reading as a product of historical crisis as well as of an impulse towards abstraction, a mode that stands at a tangent to fictional realism and the writing of history, but engages implicitly with both. Using a range of 19th and 20th century examples, I will ask how allegory functions in the literature of our modernity, commenting on Fredric Jameson and Paul de Man’s influential categorizations.
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She works on Renaissance English and European literature, Indian cultural history, modernism, narrative, cinema, sport, print cultures, theory and urban studies. Her writing engages with issues affecting higher education, the humanities, gender and social justice in India today.
Baidik Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Wednesday, 19 February 2025, 5 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/4hH9bAJ
