Guest Lecture by Ranjan Ghosh

In Transition: The Aesthetics and Politics of the ‘Across Factor’

Thursday, 26 October 2017, 6pm – Casino 1.812

Over the last decade, I have invested myself in framing critical departures and discriminative correspondences between disciplines, across the humanities and sciences, training myself in poetics and philosophy across cultures both European and non-European. This sustained investment has resulted in the emergence of a conceptual/philosophical/epistemological space that I call “trans-(in)fusion”. It is this space that has inspired and nourished both my reading and writing. This ‘thinking’ space has eased me into making intellectual articulations across paradigms and epistemes, cultures of thought and establishment – a trans-(in)fusioned understanding of issues and ideas whether in the studies of religion, philosophy of history and historiography, memory studies, critical theory, continental philosophy, theories of literature, world literature, body theory, comparative aesthetics, educational philosophy, or the philosophy of sciences. Is critical thinking always in transition? My talk will explain what I mean by trans(in)fusion, trans-habit, intra-active transculturality, aesthetic imaginary, trans-thinking (conceptual coinages that have settled into the international comparative/ world literature vocabulary) to reformulate how we produce knowledge and reconfigurate discursive and disciplinary thinking.

Ranjan Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of North Bengal in India. His publications include (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits (University Press of America, 2006); Edward Said, the Literary, Social and the Political World (London: Routledge, 2009); A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), Making Sense of the Secular (London: Routledge, 2012); Presence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, with Ethan Kleinberg, 2013); Thinking Literature across Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, with J. Hillis Miller); Transcultural Poetics (London: Routledge, 2017); Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy, Tagore: Towards a Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London: Palgrave Macmillan,  2017); Philosophy and Poetry: A Continental Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).