Assured Self, Restive Self: Encounters with Crisis

encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self - stoic or heroic, political and creative - come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.＂ --

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India and the editor of the web-journal humanitiesunderground.org.