Literature, Language, and the Classroom : Essays for Promodini Varma

This book is a Festschrift dedicated to Promodini Varma, a meticulous scholar, teacher, and administrator of extraordinary rigour, grit, and perception. It presents reflections on researching and teaching English literatures and languages in India. It concerns itself broadly with literary modernism and English language teaching and classroom pedagogy, some of the core concerns of the literary fraternity today. The volume examines how the literary and cultural manifestations of modernity have pervasively informed not just much of our disciplinary framework but many of the key issues―decolonisation, globalisation, development―our society grapples with.

With essays on William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling, the volume presents fresh insights on familiar canonical ground. It discusses ELT and classroom pedagogy and provides grounded appraisals of teaching and translating for multilingual classroom audiences given the demands of employability and the hierarchical dynamics of educational institutions. An interview on feminist pedagogy and theatre and an essay on urban nostalgia and redevelopment act as pertinent outliers, reflecting the ongoing transition to more multi-sited and interdisciplinary research and praxis.

An engaging read on some of the most pressing concerns in the field, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, English language studies, and education.

Sonali Jain is Associate Professor (English) in Bharati College, University of Delhi. Her doctoral work at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) centred on Vijay Tendulkar and the semiotics of cinema. She was Translator- in-Residence at the University of East Anglia, UK in 2008 and has translated Tendulkar’s play Baby into English. She has also edited Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Her areas of interest include psychoanalytic theory, film studies and translation. She is trained in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. She has been painting for many years and her works have been exhibited in a number of group shows.

Anubhav Pradhan is Assistant Professor with the Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Bhilai. His research straddles urban history, heritage, planning, and writing as well as colonial cultural contact and the intersections of empire and modernity. He is Deputy Editor of South Asia Research; editor of Articulating Urbanity: Writing the South Asian City (forthcoming, 2022) and co-editor of Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives (2019). He has taught at Ambedkar University Delhi, South Asian University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and the University of Delhi and has served Primus Books, Delhi as their Senior Marketing Editor. He has also been associated as a researcher with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He reviews frequently for national and international journals and has presented his work in a wide range of conferences all over the world.