Literature, as Jean-Paul Sartre
writes in his famous essay “What is Literature?” (1949), is a phenomenon that
is extremely difficult to define, and he cautions the critics neither to read
quickly nor pass judgements on any publication before they have first had
understood the concept of ‘literature’. In simple terms, however, the English
word ‘literature’, derived from the Latin ‘litterae’ denoting ‘letter’, can be
understood to indicate ‘the art of written work’, and is often not confined to
published sources. The four major classifications of literature are poetry,
prose, fiction, and non-fiction.
This critical anthology has been
titled World English Literature: Bridging Oneness. The scopes of the entire
title are numerous, and hence deserve a very brief clarification. The
conglomeration of three words ‘World’, ‘English’, and ‘Literature’ may result
in a term that is quite complex for suitable elucidation. After the Western
imperialistic ventures against the African, Asian, and South American countries
especially between the 16th and 19th centuries A.D., the connotations of the
apparently-simple word ‘world’ have increased multifariously. Following the
1952 classifications by Alfred Sauvy, numerous nations are presently being
confronted with four ‘world’ divisions:
the ‘first world’ – a term of privilege indicating the capitalistic
European and North American nations; the ‘second world’, indicating the
communist and socialist including Russia and some nations of South America; the
‘third world’ usually used derisively to indicate the economically-underprivileged
and apparently-unaligned Asian and African nations almost all of which are
former colonies of European powers; and, the ‘fourth world’, which, according
to George Manuel, should be effectively used to denote comparatively unexplored
nations of indigenous people. Therefore, the signifier ‘World English’, even in
the second half of the 20th century, might have produced multiple signified –
‘collections of English publications from the first world’, ‘leftist English
writings by authors of the so-called second world’, ‘postcolonial writings by
litterateurs of the third world’, or ‘the foruth-world writings’. The subtitle
‘Bridging Oneness’ may come as a relief for the perplexed readers and critics:
it suggests that the principal aim of the present anthology is to attempt the
establishment of a literary union between the writings from these different
‘worlds’.
With the rapid proliferation in
the socio-cultural and economic powers of principally Asian nations –
especially those of China and India – in the last two decades of the 20th and
first decade of 21st centuries A.D., implication of the term ‘world’ has
undergone a change once again. Presently, there is no longer any perceptible
polarisation. Not only have the former colonising nations like England, France,
Belgium, Portugal, and Spain, have become economically weaker, their military
strength, and hence the strength to alter histories of nations, have dwindled
to a considerable level. The communist nations have ceased to be a major
alternative bloc. Countries with indigenous people – especially Australia and
Peru – have been steadily advancing efficient litterateurs, some of whom have
received several international awards. The People’s Liberation Army of China is
now the world’s largest military force, while the Indian Army is presently the
world’s largest standing volunteer army. The demarcations between the first,
second, third, and fourth worlds have been demolished. So have been the
segregations in their respective literatures, and hence the necessity of ‘bridging’
respective literatures from these countries.
In the 21st century, the deciders
of world fate even in early 20th century, especially England and France, have
identifiably lost their power to influence global culture. On the other hand,
numerous Third World inhabitants – especially Indians – have successfully
permeated the Western segregatory socio-cultural curtains, compelling the
English Office for National Statistics to predict in October 2005 that by A.D.
2031, England is scheduled to become a cultural colony of India. Interestingly,
and paradoxically, in such changed circumstances, the term ‘world’ has re-begun
to indicate the multicultural union of nations all throughout the globe, and
‘World English Literature’ now indicates those publications and literary works
that are popular in both the West and the East – the Euro-American and the
Afro-Asian nations. ‘English’, in the middle of the title, may simply be
interpreted as a medium to ensure that the published literary works reached as
many readers as possible.
It may also be asked here that
why English is still relevant as a literary language, and why this critical
anthology should deal with ‘world literature’ written only in ‘English’. The
language of mainly the inhabitants of imperialist Britain, English became the
most popular language of the world – though not with the largest number of
speakers – by 1922 when the British Empire, as Angus Maddison and Niall
Ferguson note, was spread approximately over thirty-three and a half million
square kilometres – a quarter of earth’s total land area – and dominated around
four hundred and fifty eight million people, one-fifth of world’s total
population in the decade of the 1920s. Even in the early-21st century, English,
in its different forms and intonations, is spoken by approximately two billion
people worldwide. In India, from where the present critical anthology is being
published, approximately one hundred and thirty million people speak English.
There are different official languages of India, but the most infallible medium
for communication between people of different states is undeniably English.
Throughout the world, English is spoken in one hundred and twenty six
countries. As briefly mentioned earlier, English is among the ‘safer’ language options
for attracting wide readership, and even in the 21st century, English is one of
the more preferred languages for literary exercises.
The English imperial domination
of India for over three hundred years had galvanised its populace to learn,
speak, and use English abundantly. In the 19th century, especially, the English
colonisers had began to train Indians in English so that they could be deputed
to draft or complete imperialism-related administrative paper-works, leading to
the proliferation of the usage of the diminutive ‘writers’: the
English-educated and British-collaborating Indian clerks. However, with such
socio-political and intellectual movements like the Bengal Renaissance, the
First Indian War of Independence, and armed anti-imperial struggles especially
in Bengal, Maharastra, and Punjab, these very English-educated Indians became
potential sources of threat to English imperialists. It was also during this
period that the transformation of the English language from a colonisers’
tongue to a medium of effective communication across the linguistically-diverse
Indian regions began. Nationalists could register their anti-English sentiments
in the imperial tongue so that the inhabitants of Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, for
example, could effectively understand what an anti-imperial intellectual from
Maharastra or Bengal was trying to protest. Numerous regional works, some of
them anti-imperialist and most of them critiques of the English rule, came to
be translated into English and strengthened the Indians’ opinion against their
colonisers. Even efficient and popular literary works from around the world –
especially Germany, Russia, and France – were translated, and the Indian
commoners could understand the anti-domination sentiments of the 18th-century enlightened
Germans, anti-Tsarist Russians, or the indignant third-estate-communities of
France. These entire intellectual strengthening of opinion would culminate in
the Indian independence of 1947. Even after Independence, Indians, deeply read
in famous literary works of different countries of the world in original or
translated forms, have continued to contribute quality literature in English,
and terms like ‘Indian Writing in English’, ‘Indo-Anglian Literature’ or
‘Indian English Writings’ suggest an alternative form of the usage of the
English language where the so-called ‘pure’ or ‘traditional’ English words are
replaced by different Indian phrases or terms, especially from Hindi, Bengali,
and Tamil. In a fast-changing cultural and intellectual scenario in India, one
can only comprehend the importance, relevance, and necessity of studying world
literatures in English.
The editors of the present
critical anthology have taken an all-inclusive approach – at achieving
‘oneness’ – to ‘world literature in English’ – written in or translated into
the former imperial tongue. Their principal insistence is on acquainting
teachers, researchers, and post- and undergraduate students with different
aspects of literary works written in English in its different ‘regional’ forms
as well as in the ‘traditional’, or, if we are allowed to use the term
‘original’ avatar. This anthology contains critical approaches to works by
writers from as diversified nations as England (Edward Morgan Forster, David
Herbert Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Leopold Hamilton Myers, Graham Greene, and
William Golding) – for no critical anthology of English writings would be
successfully completed without incorporation of literary works by the inventors
and popularisers of the language itself, Ireland (George Bernard Shaw), India
(Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandaya, Mohan Rakesh, Udupi Rajagopalacharya
Ananthamurthy, Jayanti M. Dalal, Anita Desai, Arun Joshi, Chitrita Banerji,
Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Sharankumar Limbale, and Kiran Desai), Australia
(Jack Davis), Nigeria (Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe and Akinwande Oluwole
Soyinka), the United States of America (Arthur Miller, Edward Franklin Albee
III, Philip Roth, and Kenneth Elton Kesey), Canada (Margaret Atwood), Kenya
(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), and South Africa (Nadine Gordimer), among others. As far
as the Indian writers included in this anthology are concerned, Banerji,
Mistry, Ghosh, and Kiran Desai – presently the permanent residents respectively
of the U.S.A., Canada, the U.S.A., and the U.S.A. – can no longer be called
‘Indian writers’ in strictest sense of the term. They have become
world-citizens – endeared to the reading public by both their artistic
excellence and description of poignant reality. However, all these writers –
with the exception of those belonging to the United States of America (itself
an English colony until the 1780s) – are symbolically united by their belonging
to countries collectively known as the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’. And, in a
sense, World Literature in English: Bridging Oneness is a collection of
critical approaches to different superior specimens of American and Commonwealth
writings.
The term ‘Commonwealth of
Nations’ has an imperialistic connotation: it indicates a congregation of
England and its former colonies. However, in the postcolonial literary milieu
of the 21st century, the phrase itself has become an anti-imperialistic term:
it indicates the common strength of the erstwhile colonised-nations which have
congregated themselves to posit socio-economic and artistic challenges against
their former imperial centre – England – which finds itself surrounded by its
rapidly-developing former colonies. The Commonwealth is an intergovernmental
organisation of fifty-four countries, and is a forum for a number of non-governmental
organisations, which strengthen the shared culture of the Commonwealth that
extends through common sports, literary heritage, and political and legal
practices. Due to this, Commonwealth countries are not considered to be
‘foreign’ to one another, and neither are their litterateurs who are bound
together by common colonial, social, educational, and cultural experiences. It
is therefore possible that several common aspects might be traced in
publications, for example, by Forster, Achebe, Markandaya, Atwood, and
Thiong’o. Such possibilities of commonality weave together the diverse critical
essays included in the present anthology.
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