The literary world needs an intellectual conversation about writing and other creative forms of expression. There is also need to counter a set of terms created by the market in the 1990s, and to find a language with which to rediscover the strangeness of creative practices. This was elucidated by Amit Chaudhuri, writer, author and professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia at the 4th Annual International Symposium: Against Storytelling. The symposia aim at addressing topics that are no longer being addressed in mainstream academia, in conferences, or in literary festivals. The literary discourse was organised by Ashoka University, pioneers in liberal arts and science education in India, in partnership with the University of East Anglia and the India International Centre.
The symposia aimed at raising questions about the rise and centrality of “storytelling” in the past few decades, and what it signifies to a culture. It asks if imaginative work has other aspects that hold the attention as much as — often more than — “story” does.
Eminent novelists and authors such as Anjum Hasan, poets like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Geoffrey O’Brien, critics and film directors like Gurvinder Singh were among other noteworthy personalities graced the symposium this year. Saikat Majumdar novelist, author and Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ashoka University, and novelist, said: “The ongoing symposia on literary activism stage is an appeal to fragment and scatter the notion of literary value. A totalised notion of value cuts the breath from the diffuse, elusive and idiosyncratic nature of literary beauty. It’s okay for value to be local and diffuse, even provincial, to refuse to be harnessed under a synthetic excellence that fuses commerce and criticism together”. The fourth symposium celebrates Eventlessness — the narrative that drifts away from the fetish of the significant event and keeps its distance from dominant notions of storytelling.
Speaking at panel discussion, Stories and Modern Indian Literatures, Prof Udaya Kumar, Professor at the Centre for English Studies, JNU, specialising in Joyce studies and contemporary literary and cultural theory, said: “Narrative in the simple sense is inadequate as a lens for an event. Especially in dalit literature, narrative is not enough to understand the force of these autobiographies and the language of experience”. Tiffany Atkinson, Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at University of East Anglia, during her session on Lyric Embarrassment or Why I can’t tell a story, said: “The lyric poem is a momentary space where one can touch another without shame”. Now in their fourth year, the symposia wish to create a space to address questions to do with writing — indeed, with creative practice of any kind — that are no longer being addressed in mainstream academia, in conferences, or in literary festivals.
They also aim to counter a set of terms created by the market in the 1990s, and to find a language wihwhich to rediscover the strangeness of creative practice.
