We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

2025/2/22
logo of podcast New Books in Critical Theory

New Books in Critical Theory
AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
T
Tabish Khair
Topics
Tabish Khair: 我认为文学是一种独特的思维模式，故事是人类已知最古老的思维工具之一。文学通过语言与现实之间的复杂关系，使我们能够以独特且必要的方式进行思考。本书论证了文学使我们能够在语言中与现实互动，以及在现实中与语言互动，两者相互构成、不断变化且部分难以捉摸。我将这种互动模式定义为不可知论的，它抵制简单的教条，因此可以作为原教旨主义的解药。阅读文学本身，而非将其仅仅作为审美、社会学、政治和其他理论论述的材料，对人类至关重要。在这个过程中，我提出了对文学的全新定义，对宗教和原教旨主义进行了富有启发性的探讨，重新评估了科学与人文科学之间的关系，最终呼吁文学行动起来。 Morteza Hajizadeh: 通过与Tabish Khair教授的对话，我对原教旨主义有了更深入的理解，它不仅存在于宗教领域，也存在于政治和文学等其他领域。原教旨主义者往往固执己见，排斥其他观点。而文学，特别是通过不可知论的阅读方式，能够帮助我们打破这种僵局，促进批判性思维。文学作品中那些未言明之处，那些缺失和沉默，往往蕴含着更深刻的意义，需要我们去挖掘和解读。通过对经典作品进行重新解读，我们可以从新的视角审视历史和现实，从而更好地理解世界。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter introduces Tabish Khair and his book, "Literature Against Fundamentalism." It discusses the book's accessible style and its broad application of the concept of fundamentalism to various fields.
  • Tabish Khair's book challenges the conventional understanding of fundamentalism.
  • The book's accessible style makes it appealing to a wider audience.
  • The concept of fundamentalism is explored in religious, political, and literary contexts.

Shownotes Transcript

Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism.

Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and its subject matter ('reality'). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing. Literature Against Fundamentalism)* *(Oxford UP, 2024) argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language and language in reality, where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive.

Tabish Khair defines this mode of engagement as essentially an agnostic one, resistant to simple dogma. Hence, literature can provide an antidote to fundamentalism. Khair argues that reading literature as literature--and not just as material for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses--is essential for humanity. In the process, he offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature as in 'a call to arms'.

Tabish Khair is an Indian writer, academic and journalist, born (1966) and educated in the small town of Gaya in Bihar, India. After finishing his MA from Gaya, he completed a PhD at Copenhagen University and a DPhil at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is now an Associate Professor. He has been a visiting professor or research fellow at various universities and has received Carlsberg, Leverhulme, and other academic grants. Khair is also an internationally published novelist.

Morteza Hajizadeh)* is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel). Twitter).*

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices)

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory)