TOWARD AN ALTERNATIVE CRITICAL DISCOURSE

In its attempt to look for an alternative aesthetic, the monograph initially exists today, taking note of the recent incursion new theories from the West in our academia and the various critical strategies now available for Indian critics. However, The point of contention it highlights implicit theoretical paradigms which are used exclusively while analyzing Indian and Western texts, as if there was nothing available the question: Could there be an alternative which can incorporate significant elements can be redefined, rearticulated so as to become the basic for our frames of reference? In this context he opts for a crucial emphasis on Bharata's rasa theory, which specializes in the study of emotions, as laying the bias for an alternative.

The monograph then examines the feasibility of emotive poetics, its ramifications emotions cannot be isolated from other human faculties such as intellect or reason-for all of them overlap and have blurred edges, they decisively point to the world of the body as making of discourses. It posits the nation as to how rasa determines the way literary discourses and their arthitectonics function and become thereby more meaningful as cultural process, its meaningful as cultural process, its impact resulting in the gradual refinement of man's emotions. Besides the book deals with the other well-known concepts of Indian aesthetic such as ritti, alamkara, dhvani, vakrokti, and aucitya in sum, covering the entire range of literary devices and strategies used by poets, and available for use in our critical discourses.

About the Author

TRS Sharma, educated at the Universities of Mysore, Colorado (USA), and Alberta (Canada),has taught literatures in English in the Universities of Delhi, Alberta, Annaba (Algeria) and Kakatiya. He was also Senior Academic fellow and Deputy Director at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad (1987-89). Besides his full-length work on Poetic Style in Robert Frost (his ph.D. thesis at Alberta) published by Penguin Classics, India(1994). He is Chef Editor of Ancient Indian Literature: An Anthology in three volumes, which is slated to be published in the Year 2000 by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. The present Monograph is the outcome of a two-year Fellowship at the IIAS during 1996-98.

Currently, he is working as K.K. Birla Foundation Fellow on "Cultural Encounters: in the early phases of Indian civilization as represented in themes, motifs and metaphors in relevant ancient texts of Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada.

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