The Critic as Artist : An Autoethnography of World Literature

A reading of criticism as a genre of world English literature. The Critic as Artist explores forms of critical practice that fuse the perspectives of imaginative creation and scholarly enquiry to produce a new understanding of the relationship between reading, writing, teaching, and activism. Celebrating themes that emerge from the convergence of art and thought, practice and analysis, immediate experience and historical consciousness, the book argues that these themes can be neither exclusively theorized, nor exclusively embodied. For a range of writers with roots in Asia and Africa, criticism emerges as a form of autoethnography that variously foregrounds myth, folklore, and performance; history and memory; community and nationality, and the writer’s intense love-hate relation with tradition. Saikat Majumdar celebrates criticism as a literary practice that originates from the entanglements of self and archive, subject and history, individual and community through intellectual voices that are only retrievable through artistic imagination.