Mukherjee, Dr Ankhi

Job Title: CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Wadham
Period/ Subject: Victorian, 20th-21st Century, Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies

Email address: ankhi.mukherjee@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

While my first monograph, Aesthetic Hysteria, drew largely on Victorian literature and culture, my current book project, “What is a Classic?” Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon, uses select events in contemporary literature and literary criticism to examine how the canon is historically constituted and transmitted, and how classics are created in this global age. I propose that the canon, and the dominant modalities in which it is received, afford a site of historical emergence through which both the postcolonial novel and contemporary literary criticism can fruitfully rethink their cultural identity and politics. The study draws on a wide range of literary examples, from Conrad and Eliot to Naipaul, Said, Walcott, and Coetzee, the conflict of interpretations offered by postcolonial rewritings of canonical literary texts, the emergence of English as a global vernacular, the travels and travails of the Shakespearean text in India. It also highlights the role of literary criticism in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries in articulating the time, space, and critical language for the emergent ‘Literatures in English.’

I am co-editing, with Laura Marcus, the Blackwell Companion to Literary Criticism and Psychoanalysis, a project that showcases path breaking new work by thirty leading Anglo-American critics in the field of literary psychoanalysis. My next book project, Seminar Slumdog, which I plan to start in 2012, will bring together my specialism in psychoanalysis and my cultural roots in South Asia as I examine the relationship between poverty and psychoanalysis through the representation of poverty in South Asian literature and cinema, and its relation to institutional psychoanalytic approaches in the West toward the psychic maladies of the poor.

Teaching Areas:

Undergraduate: English Literature (1740-1832), Victorian Literature, Modern Literature, the history and theory of criticism, selected Special Authors and Topics.

Graduate teaching and supervision: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, Lacan and Freud, feminist and gender studies.

Recent Publications:

Books:

Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007)

Editor (with Laura Marcus), A Companion to Psychoanalysis and Literature (Blackwell Publishers, 2010)

What is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting, Repetition, and Invention of the Canon (forthcoming, 2011)

Selected Articles:

“‘This Traffic of Influence’: Derrida and Spivak,” Special Issue “Gayatri Spivak: Postcolonial and Other Pedagogies,” Parallax 60 (Summer 2011)

“‘What is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question,” Special Topic “Literary Criticism for the Twenty-first Century,” ed. Cathy Caruth and Jonathan Culler, PMLA (October 2010)

“‘Yes, sir, I was the one who got away’: Postcolonial Emergence and the Question of Global English,” Études Anglaises N°3 (2009)

“Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon,” Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2 volumes) ed. Ato Quayson, Cambridge: CUP, 2009

“Bhabha,” “Canonicity,” entries in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory (3 volumes) ed. Robert Eaglestone, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009

“The Death of the Novel and Two Postcolonial Writers,” special issue “Influence” ed. Andrew Elfenbein, Modern Language Quarterly 69.4 (December 2008): 533-556

“Fissured Skin, Inner Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Paragraph 29:6 (November 2006): 55-76

“Buried Alive: The Gothic Carceral in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction,” special issue “V. S. Naipaul” ed. Pradyumna Chauhan, South Asian Review (Fall 2005): 113-25

“‘There’s no place like home’: Exile and a Dream of Return in Salman Rushdie’s India Novels,” in special issue “Fifty Years of British Literature 1950-2000,” The Literary Criterion XL (2005): 143-52

“Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations,” Contemporary Literature 46:1 (Spring 2005): 108-33

“Stammering to Story: Neurosis and Narration in Pat Barker’s Regeneration,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43 (Fall 2001): 49-62

Other Information:

Current Project

My current book project, What is a Classic?, examines the residual influence of the Eurocentric literary canon in the global age of world literature, and emergent formations of canons and classics.

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