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The 10th Symposium in the Literary Activism Series:
‘The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay’
Scroll down to the bottom for the mission statement.
Presented by the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University
in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
and the India International Centre, New Delhi
on Friday, 28th and Saturday, 29th March, from 11 am to 5 pm.
Venue: Seminar Rooms 1, 2, & 3, India International Centre, New Delhi
Join us for the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of Literary Activism!
REGISTER HERE
As has been the case since December 2014, when these symposia began, we’re making space for a conversation usually unavailable at academic conferences and book launches.
The speakers, in alphabetical order, are:
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, and musician. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. He conceptualises the 'literary activism' symposia.
Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at University College London, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her book, Narrative in the Age of the Genome, considers measures of the human in genomic narratives.
Jon Cook is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia. Currently involved in a research collaboration with colleagues at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, he is also co-authoring a book on Democracy and Decolonization.
Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London and Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, and The Great Explosion, among others.
Mandakini Dubey is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. With several publications in literary and general interest magazines, she is working on her first book, provisionally entitled Esoteric Empire: Victorian Orientalism Between the Lines.
Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the New York Review Books Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is the author of Snake Train: Poems 1983-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.
Vineet Gill is a writer and senior copy editor at Penguin Random House India. He is also the author of Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature.
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist, academic, and a commentator on the arts, literature, and higher education. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. His latest publication is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a poet, writer, and translator. His new book of poems, Of Least Concern, will be published by Literary Activism/Westland later this year.
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems.
Colin Vanderburg is a Senior Editor at n+1 magazine and a PhD candidate in English at New York University.
Cynthia Zarin is the author of the novel Inverno; six books of poetry, including Orbit and Next Day: New and Selected Poems; five books for children; and two essay collections, Two Cities and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History. She teaches at Yale University.
Schedule:
Friday, 28th March
11:00 am | Opening Remarks
11:15 am - 12:15 pm | Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
‘Seeing Double, Hearing Double: An Experience of Reading’
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm | Lara Choksey
‘Peer Review in Public: The Case of Sociobiology’
1:30 pm - 2:15 pm | Lunch Break
2:15 pm - 3:15 pm | Colin Vanderburg
‘Quiet Please, Critics at Work’
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm | Brian Dillon
‘Essays and Affinities’
Saturday, 29th March
11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Edwin Frank
‘The Fiction of Original Response’
12:10 pm - 1:10 pm | Amit Chaudhuri
‘What on Earth Does Non-Fiction Mean?’
1:10 pm - 1:50 pm | Lunch Break
1:50 pm - 2:50 pm | Sumana Roy
‘Disobedient Women and the Terror of Reviewer 2’
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Jon Cook
‘The Essay’s Situations’
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | Panel - ‘What Can the Essay Do?’
Mandakini Dubey, Vineet Gill, Saikat Majumdar, and Cynthia Zarin
Mission Statement: The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay
This odd formulation – ‘non-peer reviewed essay’ – is a response to the excessive deference paid in India by academia to the idea of peer review: an instance, in a sense, of academia deferring to itself and to the sacred value and respectability it accords to sociological verifiability. In the process, we have been gradually forgetting the essay’s eccentricity as a form and its independence from conventional truth value. Some of the thoughts in this mission statement are, as would probably be obvious, pertinent both to the academic and the journalistic article.
This symposium wishes to reconsider essays that have a deep seriousness of intent but deliberately reject the processes and accoutrements of legitimacy required by academic journals as well as by the conventions of mainstream journalism, non-fiction, and popular history. The emergence of the non-peer reviewed essay also questions the construct through which American academia in particular has defined any kind of hybrid prose enquiry: belles-lettres.
A certain shift that involved rethinking essayistic form and expression was made possible by publications like the London Review of Books in the 1990s and early 2000s, by platforms like n+1’s ‘The Intellectual Situation’, the Books pages of The Caravan magazine in India, and the White Review in the United Kingdom. Some of these forums changed subtly or even disappeared (as is the case with the last example) while others have obstinately pursued their agenda of open forms and critical thought. It should be added here that the peer-reviewed essay has itself narrowed down over the recent decade into a site of citation.
Academia often ignores the revival that critical thought has had in the last thirty years in the non-professional domain of the essay – in some cases, of the personal essay that has a specific autobiographical subject, which also might turn out to be a critical essay. This segue between the personal and the critical was once a formative characteristic of modern criticism in writers such as Tagore, Woolf, and Lawrence. Ironically, in some of these writers, the essay, notwithstanding the fact that it carried the particularities of personality and style, explored or embodied, in crucial instances, the idea of a radical impersonality very different either from the sociological objectivity that is one of the peer-reviewed essay’s ambitions or from the notion of ‘fairness’ or balance in a review.
I’m restricting myself to the Anglophone world here, but this is not to say that this history has not reshaped, in similar or different ways, intellectual non-peer reviewed (and peer reviewed) work in other languages. Part of the rethinking of the ‘non-peer reviewed’ emerged from a Europe beyond Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Scandinavian detective novels – the Europe of Sebald, Walser, and, now, the excellent Annie Ernaux – which, characteristically, has led to a radical opening up. On the other hand, it needs to be noted that the revival has engendered a spurious sense of ownership that has largely left the non-European non-Anglophone essayist (writing, say, for Charbak or Hakara) dispossessed.
The contemporary remaking of this form has been particularly important to those who, in the period of globalisation, have noted with dismay the marginalisation of poetic practice and the immovable dominance of the novel. But there continues to be a kind of ignorance of this revival and of its provenances and implications, which include an impact on both fiction and non-fiction writing that is today referred to slightly glibly by catchphrases and terms like ‘autofiction’ and ‘genre-bending’.
The history of the non-peer reviewed essay and its crucial relationship to critical thought has also undergone a kind of erasure in the academy, in that academia both knows and teaches that history (when students are asked to read, say, ‘A Room of One’s Own or ‘The Metaphysical Poets’) while seldom addressing the way it informs its own practices – which remain overtly demarcated, professionalised, peer-reviewed, and, despite the apparent crisis in the humanities, self-perpetuating.
Amit Chaudhuri
28th September 2024
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The 10th Symposium in the Literary Activism Series:
‘The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay’
Scroll down to the bottom for the mission statement.
Presented by the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University
in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
and the India International Centre, New Delhi
on Friday, 28th and Saturday, 29th March, from 11 am to 5 pm.
Venue: Seminar Rooms 1, 2, & 3, India International Centre, New Delhi
Join us for the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of Literary Activism!
REGISTER HERE
As has been the case since December 2014, when these symposia began, we’re making space for a conversation usually unavailable at academic conferences and book launches.
The speakers, in alphabetical order, are:
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, and musician. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. He conceptualises the 'literary activism' symposia.
Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at University College London, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her book, Narrative in the Age of the Genome, considers measures of the human in genomic narratives.
Jon Cook is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia. Currently involved in a research collaboration with colleagues at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, he is also co-authoring a book on Democracy and Decolonization.
Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London and Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, and The Great Explosion, among others.
Mandakini Dubey is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. With several publications in literary and general interest magazines, she is working on her first book, provisionally entitled Esoteric Empire: Victorian Orientalism Between the Lines.
Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the New York Review Books Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is the author of Snake Train: Poems 1983-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.
Vineet Gill is a writer and senior copy editor at Penguin Random House India. He is also the author of Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature.
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist, academic, and a commentator on the arts, literature, and higher education. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. His latest publication is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a poet, writer, and translator. His new book of poems, Of Least Concern, will be published by Literary Activism/Westland later this year.
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems.
Colin Vanderburg is a Senior Editor at n+1 magazine and a PhD candidate in English at New York University.
Cynthia Zarin is the author of the novel Inverno; six books of poetry, including Orbit and Next Day: New and Selected Poems; five books for children; and two essay collections, Two Cities and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History. She teaches at Yale University.
Schedule:
Friday, 28th March
11:00 am | Opening Remarks
11:15 am - 12:15 pm | Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
‘Seeing Double, Hearing Double: An Experience of Reading’
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm | Lara Choksey
‘Peer Review in Public: The Case of Sociobiology’
1:30 pm - 2:15 pm | Lunch Break
2:15 pm - 3:15 pm | Colin Vanderburg
‘Quiet Please, Critics at Work’
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm | Brian Dillon
‘Essays and Affinities’
Saturday, 29th March
11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Edwin Frank
‘The Fiction of Original Response’
12:10 pm - 1:10 pm | Amit Chaudhuri
‘What on Earth Does Non-Fiction Mean?’
1:10 pm - 1:50 pm | Lunch Break
1:50 pm - 2:50 pm | Sumana Roy
‘Disobedient Women and the Terror of Reviewer 2’
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Jon Cook
‘The Essay’s Situations’
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | Panel - ‘What Can the Essay Do?’
Mandakini Dubey, Vineet Gill, Saikat Majumdar, and Cynthia Zarin
Mission Statement: The Non-Peer Reviewed Essay
This odd formulation – ‘non-peer reviewed essay’ – is a response to the excessive deference paid in India by academia to the idea of peer review: an instance, in a sense, of academia deferring to itself and to the sacred value and respectability it accords to sociological verifiability. In the process, we have been gradually forgetting the essay’s eccentricity as a form and its independence from conventional truth value. Some of the thoughts in this mission statement are, as would probably be obvious, pertinent both to the academic and the journalistic article.
This symposium wishes to reconsider essays that have a deep seriousness of intent but deliberately reject the processes and accoutrements of legitimacy required by academic journals as well as by the conventions of mainstream journalism, non-fiction, and popular history. The emergence of the non-peer reviewed essay also questions the construct through which American academia in particular has defined any kind of hybrid prose enquiry: belles-lettres.
A certain shift that involved rethinking essayistic form and expression was made possible by publications like the London Review of Books in the 1990s and early 2000s, by platforms like n+1’s ‘The Intellectual Situation’, the Books pages of The Caravan magazine in India, and the White Review in the United Kingdom. Some of these forums changed subtly or even disappeared (as is the case with the last example) while others have obstinately pursued their agenda of open forms and critical thought. It should be added here that the peer-reviewed essay has itself narrowed down over the recent decade into a site of citation.
Academia often ignores the revival that critical thought has had in the last thirty years in the non-professional domain of the essay – in some cases, of the personal essay that has a specific autobiographical subject, which also might turn out to be a critical essay. This segue between the personal and the critical was once a formative characteristic of modern criticism in writers such as Tagore, Woolf, and Lawrence. Ironically, in some of these writers, the essay, notwithstanding the fact that it carried the particularities of personality and style, explored or embodied, in crucial instances, the idea of a radical impersonality very different either from the sociological objectivity that is one of the peer-reviewed essay’s ambitions or from the notion of ‘fairness’ or balance in a review.
I’m restricting myself to the Anglophone world here, but this is not to say that this history has not reshaped, in similar or different ways, intellectual non-peer reviewed (and peer reviewed) work in other languages. Part of the rethinking of the ‘non-peer reviewed’ emerged from a Europe beyond Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Scandinavian detective novels – the Europe of Sebald, Walser, and, now, the excellent Annie Ernaux – which, characteristically, has led to a radical opening up. On the other hand, it needs to be noted that the revival has engendered a spurious sense of ownership that has largely left the non-European non-Anglophone essayist (writing, say, for Charbak or Hakara) dispossessed.
The contemporary remaking of this form has been particularly important to those who, in the period of globalisation, have noted with dismay the marginalisation of poetic practice and the immovable dominance of the novel. But there continues to be a kind of ignorance of this revival and of its provenances and implications, which include an impact on both fiction and non-fiction writing that is today referred to slightly glibly by catchphrases and terms like ‘autofiction’ and ‘genre-bending’.
The history of the non-peer reviewed essay and its crucial relationship to critical thought has also undergone a kind of erasure in the academy, in that academia both knows and teaches that history (when students are asked to read, say, ‘A Room of One’s Own or ‘The Metaphysical Poets’) while seldom addressing the way it informs its own practices – which remain overtly demarcated, professionalised, peer-reviewed, and, despite the apparent crisis in the humanities, self-perpetuating.
Amit Chaudhuri
28th September 2024
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