Thinking literature across continents

'Thinking Literature across Continents' finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller--two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives--debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. This book highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.

Introduction: Thinking across continents / Ranjan Ghosh -- Introduction continued: The idiosyncrasy of the literary text / J. Hillis Miller -- Making Sahitya matter / Ranjan Ghosh -- Literature matters today / J. Hillis Miller -- The story of a poem / Ranjan Ghosh -- Western theories of poetry : reading Wallace Stevens's "The motive for metaphor" -- / J. Hillis Miller -- More than global / Ranjan Ghosh -- Globalization and world literature / J. Hillis Miller -- Reinventing the teaching machine : looking for a text in an Indian classroom / Ranjan Ghosh -- Should we read or teach literature now? / J. Hillis Miller -- The ethics of reading Sahitya / Ranjan Ghosh -- Literature and ethics : truth and lie in Framley parsonage / J. Hillis Miller.