Dislocating the Language of Modernity in Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason

IF 0.5 2区文学 0 LITERATURE

STUDIES IN THE NOVEL Pub Date : 2024-08-27 DOI:10.1353/sdn.2024.a935473

Derek Ettensohn

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract:

Engaging with Amitav Ghosh's recent essays that link imperial modernity's mechanistic view of the world to the novel's failure to imagine climate change, this article examines how Ghosh's fiction attempts to dislocate narratives of modernity to reveal a world constructed by capital and naturalized through reason. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists on the introduction of Western science to India, this article returns to Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason, to focus on the intimate scale of the transformations that imperial modernity enacted on the human body and psyche. Though underrepresented in scholarship on Ghosh, this novel is a critical site for understanding Ghosh's view of how the ideology of modernity gets entrenched as scientific reason, reshaping humankind's relationship with the human body and the surrounding world. The novel's representation of the body, moreover, proposes an intimate and uncanny space that discloses alternative ways of imagining the world.

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阿米塔夫-高什《理性之圈》中的现代性语言错位

摘要:阿米塔夫-戈什（Amitav Ghosh）最近发表文章，将帝国现代性的机械主义世界观与小说未能想象的气候变化联系起来，本文探讨了戈什的小说如何试图将现代性叙述错位，以揭示一个由资本构建并通过理性自然化的世界。本文借鉴了后殖民主义理论家关于西方科学传入印度的研究成果，回到戈什的第一部小说《理性的圆圈》，关注帝国现代性对人类身体和心理所造成的亲密规模的改变。虽然这部小说在研究戈什的学术著作中代表性不足，但它是了解戈什如何将现代性意识形态固化为科学理性、重塑人类与人体及周围世界关系的重要场所。此外，小说对身体的表现提出了一个亲密而不可思议的空间，揭示了想象世界的另一种方式。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

STUDIES IN THE NOVEL LITERATURE-

CiteScore

0.40

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0.00%

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期刊介绍： From its inception, Studies in the Novel has been dedicated to building a scholarly community around the world-making potentialities of the novel. Studies in the Novel started as an idea among several members of the English Department of the University of North Texas during the summer of 1965. They determined that there was a need for a journal “devoted to publishing critical and scholarly articles on the novel with no restrictions on either chronology or nationality of the novelists studied.” The founding editor, University of North Texas professor of contemporary literature James W. Lee, envisioned a journal of international scope and influence. Since then, Studies in the Novel has staked its reputation upon publishing incisive scholarship on the canon-forming and cutting-edge novelists that have shaped the genre’s rich history. The journal continues to break new ground by promoting new theoretical approaches, a broader international scope, and an engagement with the contemporary novel as a form of social critique.