-
Why Literary Theory, Understanding Literary Theory, and After Theory: Reflections through Cultural Studies, Subaltern Studies and Posthumanism
Reading a poem or a novel appears to be the most natural of activities. A reader opens the book, follows the words, responds to the story or the feeling, and closes the book with some sense of pleasure or understanding. Literary theory begins at the moment when this apparently natural activity is interrupted by a…
-
Homer’s Iliad: A Detailed Summary
Homer’s Iliad (composed in oral tradition around the eighth century BCE) is one of the two great epic poems of ancient Greece, the other being the Odyssey. The poem is written in dactylic hexameter (a poetic metre of six feet per line) and is divided into twenty four books. Although the Iliad is set during…
-
The Making of Literary Theory: Accidental Theorists, Surprised Makings, the Politics of Theory, and the University’s Reception and Resistance
Literary theory is usually taught as if it were a natural sequence of ideas, a relay race in which formalism hands the baton to structuralism, structuralism to post-structuralism, and so on down to the present. This tidy picture conceals a far more interesting truth. Theory did not descend from the sky as a finished doctrine;…
-
The Pedagogy and Politics of Teaching Literary Theory in Indian Universities and Technical Institutes
Literary theory in India is taught in two very different institutional homes, and the difference is itself instructive. In the literature departments of central, state and private universities, theory sits inside a discipline with a long colonial genealogy, taught to students who have chosen literature as their subject. In the humanities and social sciences departments…
-
Precarity and Its Literatures: An Introduction
The word “precarious” derives from the Latin “precarius”, which described something held only by the favour of another, something obtained through entreaty or prayer, from “prex”, meaning prayer. To live precariously, in the oldest sense of the word, is therefore to live in dependence, to occupy a position from which one can be dismissed at…
-
The Feminised Spectre: Queer Hauntology and Masculine Hysteria in Rahul Sadasivan’s Diés Iraé (2025)
by Esha Ann Mariya Malayalam horror cinema grows out of a cultural landscape shaped by Kerala’s deep repertoire of Yakshi stories – female spirits returning from the dead burdened by grief, betrayal, desire, rage or unfinished longing. Contemporary films continue to draw from this tradition, often returning to a familiar storyline in which a woman’s…
-
Reading a Literary Text through the Lens of Environmental Humanities
Reading a literary text through the lens of Environmental Humanities is not a single, uniform act but a layered, interdisciplinary process that draws simultaneously from ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, material feminism, posthumanism, and the environmental sciences to illuminate how literature encodes, contests, and reshapes humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The Environmental Humanities, as a field,…
-
Myth, Science, and Ecological Consciousness in Vandana Singh’s The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories
by Riya Bhatia Armed with the powerful tool of imagination, Vandana Singh, widely regarded as the first speculative fiction writer, advocates against the “pathologically solipsist” dominant paradigms such as anthropocentrism, violence of patriarchy, colonialism, and (ir)rationalities of modernism to foreground the “transgressive potential” of speculative fiction at the grand stage of the universe (200-01). In The…
-
The Poetics of the Natural World: A Literary Evolution of Ecology
The history of Ecology is the intellectual chronicle of humanity’s changing perception of its own dwelling place, the Earth. It is a narrative that begins in the realm of philosophy and natural history, passes through the crucible of the Enlightenment’s taxonomic zeal, and emerges, in modern times, as a vital, interdisciplinary critique of global civilization.…
-
The ‘Ungrievable’ Exodus: A Critical Analysis of Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots through the Lens of Precarity, State Failure, and Critical Theory
Abstract This note presents a critical analysis of Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, arguing that the text functions as a powerful, albeit contested, testament to the multifaceted precarity of the Kashmiri Pandit community. The central thesis is that this precarity is a direct consequence of a deliberate…
-
State Failure and Ungrievable Lives in Our Moon Has Blood Clots
Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots is not merely a personal history but a searing document of precarity, a condition of social and political vulnerability that is deliberately manufactured by a failure of the state. Pandita’s personal narrative provides a powerful counter-discourse to dominant state narratives and the prevailing intellectual “apathy” that has, for decades, rendered…
-
Verisimilitude in Drama
Verisimilitude, in its essence, refers to the appearance of truth or reality in a literary work, particularly in drama. It is the quality that makes a fictional world, its characters, events, and dialogue, seem believable and plausible to the audience, even if the events depicted are not literally real. It’s about how closely the dramatic…
Literary Latitude 