The Origins of Dislike [Hardcover]

In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading.

Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.

Introduction
The Origins of Dislike
The Piazza and the Car Park
Poetry as Polemic
Deprofessionalisation and Legitimacy
The Other Green
On theGita: Krishna as Poetic Language
The Alien Face of Cosmopolitanism: An Indian Reading of Cynthia Ozick on the Woolfs
Qatrina and the Books: Nadeem Aslam and others
Ray and Ghatak and Other Filmmaking Pairs: The structure of Asian modernity
The Photographer as Onlooker
The Sideways Movement
Unconstitutional Spaces
Un-machinelike
Nissim Ezekiel: Poet of a Minor Literature
The Emergence of the Everyday: Kipling, Tagore and Indian Regional Writing
Possible, not Alternative, Histories
Starting From Scratch: Buddhadeva Bose and the English Language
On the Paragraph
'Iam Ramu'

These essays testify to a formidable intelligence at work. Chaudhuri's engaging yet exacting reflections range widely across literature and tlc1