Department of English
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Item Open Access Living on the Edge: (Re) thinking extinction in select 21st century climate change fictions(University of North Bengal, 2023) Sarkar, Somasree; Chowdhury, Pradipta ShyamClimate change is attributed to anthropogenic forces, according to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which focuses attention on the negative effects of humans on the Earth and its environment. The naming of the current geological epoch as “Anthropocene” by Atmospheric Chemist Paul J. Crutzen and Biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, which holds humans as the primary geophysical forces, adds to the recognition of human beings affecting the global climate. The coinage of the term “Anthropocene,” along with suggestions that humans are altering the planet in ways that are hazardous to the rest of the species and the entire planet, has sparked inter-disciplinary debate about the various implications the new epoch may hold for humanity and our planet. The terms “Anthropocene” and “anthropogenic climate change” are frequently used interchangeably, implying that the current epoch represents unprecedented human dominance and unrelenting anthropogenic practices harming the global ecology. Concerns about the sixth mass extinction have arisen as a result of suggestions about the deteriorating planetary ecology. Today, scientists have reached an agreement on the occurrences of five mass extinction events several million years ago in Earth’s vast history. The latest and fifth mass extinction event, which presumably occurred 65 million years ago, annihilated the entire dinosaur population, ending the Cretaceous period. The discovery of dinosaur fossils in the 1820s informed scientists about the giant extinct creatures that once roamed the Earth millions of years ago. Since then, humans have become aware of the phenomenon known as extinction, leading to the assumption of the occurrence of five major extinction events. Today’s observations and persistent warnings about climate change and its massive effects on the planet raise the prospect of another extinction event. The Earth is said to be experiencing the sixth mass extinction because it is rapidly losing biodiversity, and the rate of extinction is said to be exceeding the rate of speciation. Scientists attribute this biodiversity loss to the unprecedented warming of the climate caused by massive amounts of fossil fuel consumption. Thus, carbon emissions are to blame for the decline in biodiversity and, eventually, the disruption of the Earth system’s balance. Humans’ deleterious activities that degrade the planetary ecology endanger the lives of their own species, as humans are in no way independent of the planetary system. Human vulnerability heightens concern about extinction, as humans realise their fate is linked to the volatile Earth system. This adds a paradox to the concept of the Anthropocene, which on the one hand acknowledges human dominance while cautioning humans about their activities that make them vulnerable. In highlighting humans’ existential conundrum in the Anthropocene, I argue that humans are constantly living with the fear of extinction. This awareness bothers human conscience, and predictions of mass extinction of species (including humans) cause anxiety and trauma. Such predictions have conjured up images of a potentially inhabitable planet on the verge of extinction. Visual media have mediated speculative narratives about climate disasters that are likely to significantly alter the contours of the Earth, and literary texts have created futuristic worlds to speculate on situations critical to human survival. Such narratives (pre)exhibit horrific images of melting polar ice caps, drowned cities, homeless climate refugees, water scarcity, food shortage, and a topsy-turvy socioeconomic system, instilling fear and anxiety about the future while warning current generations of these impending chaotic situations. As a result, these cautionary narratives implore us to act to mitigate the climate crisis as well as to adopt newer ways of living with changing climatic conditions. Climate consciousness is inextricably linked with extinction consciousness, which drives humans to resist climate change and avoid impending extinction. Human efforts to resist the climate crisis and eventual extinction, I argue, constitute human survival politics. In delving deeply into human-created speculative scenarios about human-caused climate catastrophes, which are assumed to drive humans to extinction, I intend to argue that such speculations primarily address fear about the future dissolution of human agency. As a result of this fear, humans are motivated by their proclivity to act to prevent human extinction, implying the loss of their agency. The possibility of losing human agency in the future keeps people thinking about ways to keep their agency. As a result, humans are devising methods to extend their lives despite the challenging climatic conditions, leveraging their technological and capitalistic strengths. In addition, telling speculative stories about anthropogenic climate catastrophe and extinction is part of human survival politics because these stories imaginatively present scenarios that humans may face in the future. Furthermore, these narratives imagine alternate ways of living, framing alternative futures for humans, thereby assisting them in strategising their future in order to adapt to climate change. Thus, viewing extinction through the lens of human survival politics can open a new field of study, implying that extinction does not necessarily represent a finality, signalling the end of time. Extinction instead, can be viewed as a threshold concept that invariably includes implications for survival. In this case, “Anthropocene thinking,” as I use in the thesis, comes into play. Here, I intend to evaluate the Anthropocene not as an epoch only, but also as a way of thinking that grapples with human conscience and that humans are reluctant to let go of. Humans’ desire to live longer characterises their futuristic narratives, which are fraught with anthropogenic marks. This demonstrates that humans’ future thinking features themselves that extend the Anthropocene in time and thought. Throughout the thesis, I intend to argue that, despite claims of developing non-anthropocentric or post-anthropocentric thinking and looking beyond the species, Homo sapiens, there is a less likely chance of decentering human agency. Arguing that extinction characterises the conscience of the twenty-first century more than ever before, I have chosen four twenty-first century novels - Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Claire Holroyde’s The Effort (2021), Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) - to examine the concept of extinction, while focusing on human survival politics. These novels depict hypothetical scenarios of anthropogenic climate change, while prompting ways for recovery and resurgence from the climate crisis. Laying the theoretical foundation for the thesis in the introductory chapter, titled “Introduction: Anthropocene Thinking and Surviving Extinction,” I proceed on to the succeeding chapters, each focused on one of the selected novels mentioned above. The second chapter “The Stone Gods: Speculating Extinction in Diverse Timescales” emphasises the importance of viewing climate change and extinction over broad timescales because climate change is a complex process that is difficult to assess within a given timeframe. Jeanette Winterson depicts human existence with their indelible marks in various timescales in the novel, establishing a circular narrative scheme that suggests human history is repetitive in any given timescale. I situate the text within Anthropocene discourses, emphasising that the Anthropocene is not only an epoch, but also a way of thinking that occupies human conscience. Furthermore, I contend that Winterson’s narrative expresses her concern for the future of human civilisation, which is based on her knowledge of the present, which is based on her knowledge of the past. With this, the narrative connects the past, present, and future, all while portraying humans as overpowering forces suffering from their own mistakes. As I argue, this perhaps expresses the author’s concern about human critical conditions, which ultimately speaks of her commitment to her own beings, making her narrative essentially anthropocentric in thinking. The third chapter, “The Effort: Trauma and the Anticipation of Extinction in an Apocalyptic Timescale,” explores the trauma associated with the prospect of extinction. The anxiety bred with the prediction of a comet crashing the Earth’s surface in Claire Holroyde’s The Effort serves as the foundation for analysing the anxiety and trauma associated with extinction. For this, I seek to borrow Kaplan’s concept of “pretrauma,” which elaborates on the trauma caused by climate change predictions. Through a critical examination of the mental breakdown caused by the threat of a comet crash in The Effort, I seek to coin the term “extinction trauma,” which is specifically associated with the fear of extinction threatening human existence. Furthermore, I intend to argue that “extinction trauma” disturbs human conscience, which is intrigued by imaginations of impending disasters, while also compelling humans to seek ways to survive the disaster in order to prolong human existence on Earth. The fourth chapter, “Hummingbird Salamander: Awareness of Species Extinction and the Role of De-extinction in Species Revival,” examines species extinction and its impact on human conscience in the context of Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander. The chapter aims to establish a deep connection between the human and nonhuman worlds and to explain how the decline of nonhuman ecology has a significant impact on the human world. I argue, emphasising the socio-cultural significance of extinction, that the extinction of nonhuman species violates the “ethical time” (Rose 128) that connects generations of living beings. Thus, “ethical time” ensures the continuity of multiple species within the web of life. Recognising the importance of maintaining inter-species connections, I question the ethical grounds of bioterrorism and radical methods for species conservation, as well as the viability of adopting de-extinction methods for restoring and resurrecting extinct beings. Finally, I argue that human ambitious efforts to reverse the process of extinction by deploying synthetic biology techniques are manifestations of human hubris of being able to control the ecosystem, pointing once again to human interventions in changing the world on their terms. The fifth chapter, “New York 2140: Foreseeing a Rise in Sea Level and Fostering Climate Positivity in the Era of Extinction,” contextualised on Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, demonstrates how the much anticipated sea level rise acts as an instrument of socio-economic changes in New York a century into the future. I intend to view the Earth in the twenty-second century, as presented in the novel, by drawing on current climate observations. In addition, I seek to evaluate those human endeavours that, speculatively, have caused the unprecedented rise in sea level by 50 feet that has drowned lower Manhattan and the city’s outskirts. Without diminishing the dire human conditions and extinction threat posed by the critical climate crisis, the author appears to promote climate positivity by placing faith in humans’ ability to adapt. Adopting the author’s upbeat tone, I would like to argue that climate positivity is important for avoiding climate anxiety and trauma, and that it also suggests that humans may evolve in tandem with their surroundings to ensure their survival. Finally, in the concluding chapter, “Conclusion: Extinction: Thinking and Beyond,” I attempt to formulate the “extinction thinking.” I argue that the term gains relevance in the “era of extinction” for human interventions in the process of extinction for the first time in Earth’s history. Such a suggestion has made humans aware of their unrivalled position in the Earth system, which they innately want to maintain in the future. This also links “extinction thinking” to “Anthropocene thinking,” as both lines of thought prioritise the continuation of human agency in extended time and space.Item Open Access Stephen Spender: The language of imagination and inquiry submitted to the University of North Bengal(University of North Bengal, 2022) Oraon, Karishma; Mitra, ZiniaHailed more as a poet of the thirties than as a poet of the century, sometimes dismissed as a ‘Pylons poet’ who thrived in the penumbra of Auden, Stephen (Harold) Spender (1909-1995) has long been remembered chiefly for his autobiography World Within World (1951) or as a critic and an academic in his own right. In the last quarter of the last century a rehabilitation of Spender as a poet started taking place. In spite of this forty-odd years old critical acclaim, the traditional view of Spender as a social poet, a poet of crisis, persisted. The reason is not far to seek. His brief romance with Marxism / Communism, his retrospective self-analysis that “We [the Auden Group] were the Hamlets of the Thirties” and the huge popularity of his poem “The Express” on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to this indelible image of Spender as poet of social / political enquiry. In fact, people who had interest in the poetry of the 1930s almost habitually neglected the language of emotion in Spender’s poetry and were happy with the rhetoric of inquiry evident there. A proper rehabilitation, however belated, of Spender should be inclusive, and not exclusive in nature so that the two voices – one of emotion, and the other of inquiry – can be explored and juxtaposed with a view to understanding the interplay of aesthetics and politics in his poetry. This, it may be argued, is necessary for a comprehensive evaluation of Spender, for viewing him not simply as a poet of crisis, but also a poet in crisis. Hence, a work along the line of what is indicated in the title of this research is neither trite nor superfluous. A traditional and quite popular approach to literature is : behind a book there is a man, and around that man there is the society he belongs to. This ‘model’ may in geometrical terms be called the concentric circle model where more than one circle has a common, single center. While viewing Spender as a social poet, a poet of crisis, this model does work to a considerable extent – at least as far as his language of inquiry is concerned. Across his works he has revealed a preoccupation with what he metaphorically calls ‘the center and the circumference’.But the point is that when he concedes that ‘Both center and circumference are my weakness’ (“Darkness and Light”), we are led to suspect that he is rather engulfed in more than one overlapping circle. And this calls for a second model for a proper evaluation of his poetry. Borrowing from the domain of Mathematics and Logic, we can name this second model as Venn diagram in which a set of circles exist intersectionally. At least two intersecting circles can then be observed in Spender’s oeuvre: one registering the language of imagination and the other, that of inquiry. Spender’s concerns, often disharmonious in nature, of individual and the social color, divided the world of Spender into that of imagination and inquiry. In his early writings Spender shared with others of the Auden group two common features : 1) a move away from early individualism towards Marxism, and , 2) conflicting emotions and intellectual contradictions that stemmed from the move taken. In most of the pieces in Poems, Spender voices forth the inhibitions and inadequacies of himself and humanity as denizens of a world listless to the needs of man. He, therefore, seems to grapple with ambivalent motives : a search for absolute certainties, and acceptance of the ruptures in human experience. As Justin Replogle puts it: “The conflict is between the body and the mind, the world and the absolute” (“The Auden Group” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 5, No.1, (1964). This dichotomy well surfaces in such lines as ‘An “I” can never be a great man’, and ‘Never being, but always at the edge of Being’. It is not surprising that in The Still Centre (1939) his great interest in the individual, nebulously present during his rendezvous with Marxism, resurfaces to claim that personal and social health, heavily relies on private love, on the tangent of individual still centres. As a matter of fact, Spender was less tempermentally fitted for Marxism than the other members of the Auden group, and he could never discard the romantic disposition which actually permeated his whole being. He could not get away from demonstrating a veritable record of concern for his own experience as well as for the innate nature of man; and the result was that for him the individual was at the center of the social. Even in Vienna (the most ‘Marxist’ of his works), he tried to integrate the public events in the city into his private experience. The predicament of being caught between two circles is well revealed in his play Trial of a Judge where the Judge is portrayed as the only noble human figure with liberal, anti-Marxist precepts. No wonder, then, that right from Nine Experiments (1928) to Dolphins (1994), Spender leaves traces of the Venn diagrammatic worlds where the language of imagination and that of inquiry converge. The proposed study will try and answer some such questions as the following: 1. How was the poetics of Spender’s early works shaped by his politics? 2. What, in fact, Spender meant by the ‘Destructive’ and ‘Creative’ elements that constitute a poet’s engagement with the self (the ‘still centre’) and the society (the ‘other’ / the ‘circumference’)? 3. How did Spender’s poet-critic and critic-poet roles reflect the interface between the language of imagination and that of inquiry? 4. What was the impact of Spender’s disillusionment with Communism on his later works? 5. Was it a ‘world-within-a world’ or a Venn diagrammatic world that Spender as a poet was a denizen of? 6 .How far does Spender’s last work, Dolphins (published in 1994, just a year before his death) differ, if at all, from his earlier works in terms of the language of imagination and that of inquiry? The Introductory chapter of the thesis will first outline the project undertaken, and then take a generalized look at the Auden group and Spender’s position in it-the second section of the first chapter is an overview of the Auden group. The Second chapter focuses on the subtext of Spender ‘s Socio-political poems. In so doing , it primarily falls back on his autobiography, World Within World ,which still remains an authoritative expose of the times between the wars . The prevalent incertitude has nicely been summed up in this little master piece: “[…] We were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the World from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right” (174). The language of imagination and that of inquiry in his poetry of the period were tinged with a deep sense of crises. Before we enter the world(s) of Spender’s poetry, the Third chapter tries to understand what he actually meant by the ‘Destructive’ and ‘Creative’ elements, and also how these two elements were in operations in his use of language of imagination and also in that of inquiry. Hence, the third chapter tries to adumbrate the ideas contained in his The Destructive Element (1935) and The Creative Element (1953). In 1935, Spender privileged inquiry over imagination; eighteen years later he was happy to invert his quondam critical stance. What could be the poet’s steady ethics amidst so many diversions? This question probably plagued him always in his treatment of political events, of man as a social being, of progress as a necessary evil, and of different kinds of love that binds man to man sexually and asexually. If he failed to find a satisfactory answer, his failure generated a constant dialogue, an interconnection, between the overlapping worlds. Chapter Four tries and traces the tangents that connect the Spenderian worlds in which imagination and inquiry co-inhabit. Published just a year before the poet’s death, Dolphins (1994) is yet to receive an adequate critical attention. The last years of Spender’s life were not very congenial to the octogenarian poet, although he was anxious to bring out a final volume of poems, however tiny, to call it quits. What kind of inquiry and imagination, and what corresponding language, does this valedictory volume offer? The Concluding chapter centers around this important question. Spender’s inclination for delicate romanticism returns, it appears, not with inquiry but with recollection. Now beyond the center and circumference, beyond the tiring navigation between the circles of a Venn diagram, beyond any struggle of the modern, the aged poet can bring imagination and inquiry together as the pranksters of the sea and humans play out their mutual friendliness.Item Open Access Ethics, Monstrosity, Stupidity: Animal Poetics & Contemporary ‘Literary’ Thinking(University of North Bengal, 2022) Nandi, Ratul; Ghosh, RanjanMy thesis attempts to find the ‘literary’ answer to the problem of knowing the animals from their own ontological enclosures. Mobilising the word ‘Poetics’ to resonate a paradoxical awareness of animals’ being, which we at once succeed and fail to discover, the project seeks to uncover how the works of literature as ‘poiesis’ are fundamentally consistent with such an im-possible animality. While not discrediting the empirical dimension of an animal’s being, my work attunes to what is at stake in our attempts to conceptualise animal thinking. Primarily conceptual, the project examines the stakes of literature to put in motion the ‘onto-epistemic’ paradoxes and disorientations that underlie the question of animals and their seemingly ‘straightforward’ representations. Refusing to see the animals neither solely in their physical register nor in their conceptual costume, the project homes in on a ‘in-between’ experience that does not draw any demarcation between species identity: between the animal and the human. The expression ‘Animal Poetics’ does not seek to bring home yet another ‘human standpoint’ on animal lives but proceeds to read all forms of animal thinking as primarily arising out of a deeply entangled human-animal consciousness, an experience that always comes before the event of actual animal subjectivity. Sniffing the scent of such a singular animality, the chapters here present us with three of the most commonplace approaches to animal lives: ethics, stupidity and monstrosity. My first chapter, titled “Animal Poetics & The Question of Ethics,” problematises the very idea of animal ethics through a close reading of two fictional works by the novelist J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace and Lives of the Animals. In Disgrace, the chapter reads the relationship between David Lurie and his dogs as hinting towards an alternative platform for thinking animal-centric ethics which is anchored nether upon the ‘sameness’ nor ‘difference’ between animal and the human species, but upon a feeling of mutual indistinguishability brought on by a feeling of epistemic incertitude. In Lives of the Animals, the chapter unearths the tacit anthropocentrism at play in western thinking that avows to speak for the animals. Deciding to read against the grain of an ostensibly zoo-centric aspiration of the novelist Elizabeth Costello, it unmasks the more profound ‘sacrificial logic’ at work in the discourse of vegetarianism widely accepted to function as a mode of dietetic redemption. The second chapter – “Animal Poetics and the limit of Stupidity” – ties in with the problem of stupidity, a supposedly ‘lesser’ behavioural trait so often imputed to animals for the alleged lack of language and logical thinking. However, the chapter overturns such run-of-the-mill contention by engaging with two of Frantz Kafka’s notable zoo poetical texts, The Metamorphosis and A Report to an Academy. In both texts, the chapter discovers a conscious literary design that deliberately seeks to obscure our received ideas of animal subjectivity by drawing attention to a figure of an ‘animal within’, an experience, it claims, that is irretrievably entangled with our experience of the literature and language. My final chapter titled “Animal Poetics and the Monstrosity of the Other” probes into the concept of ‘monstrous Other’ or monstrosity and re-locates it at the febrile frontier between the human and the animal species. As it recalibrates our banal reception of literary monsters, the chapter further invites us to examine the very power of literary texts to construct monstrous discourses that can eventually return its readers to a state of an (in-between) ontological disruption in themselves. However, what unites all these chapters is my underlying belief in the elusive and ambivalent ontology of animal life, a reality that is at once disclosed to and withheld from its readers and leaves them perpetually in the ontological ‘no-man’s land’ between the human and the animal. The poetics of such ‘indistinction’ is, as my project argues, inextricably bound up with the experience of literature. ‘Animal Poetics’ does not attempt to be objectively accurate about specificities of animal life as such, but lays bare the deeper considerations at work in such authoritarian undertakings: it is not concerned with animals as a theriomorphic reality, the animal as it ‘is’, but with the animal as an experience of the ‘im-possible’.Item Open Access Thinking the 'Hero' performing the 'super' : philosophical interventions in the concept of the superhero today(University of North Bengal, 2021) Misra, Aditya; Ghosh, RanjanItem Open Access 'City plays' : a study of urban theatre in India since the 1970s(University of North Bengal, 2021) Roy, Sylee; Sengupta, AshisItem Open Access Idling with(in) history: flanerie and alternative historiography in selected novels of Orhan Pamuk(University of North Bengal, 2020) Mukherjee, Rupayan; Ghosh, Ranjan,Item Open Access Trans-lation, poetics and politics: reflections on Clinton B. Seely's the slaying of Meghanada: a Ramayana from Colonial Bengal and William Radice's the poem of the Killing of Meghnad(University of North Bengal, 2020) Khan, Peenaz; Roy, BinayakItem Open Access Theatre of their own: indian women play wrights in perspective(University of North Bengal, 2019) Das, Pinaki Ranjan ,; Sengupta, Ashis,Item Open Access Literature of crisis: reading recent scandinavian crime fiction(University of North Bengal, 2019) Sinha, Mandika; Samanta, Soumyajit,Item Open Access Larkin Lost, Larkin Found: Towards a New Poetics of Reading(University of North Bengal, 2019) Chakraborty, Avijit; Laha, Chandanashis