Zukunftsphilologie
2011/ 2012

Prashant Keshavmurthy

Why do we take Pleasure in Representations? An Answer from eighteenth century Indo-Persian Literary Criticism

Prashant Keshavmurthy is currently Assistant Professor of Persian Studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He completed his dissertation at the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures with an affiliation to the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York, in 2010. In his dissertation, Keshavmurthy first analyzed the conceptions of fiction and its authorship in Persian and Urdu literary cultures of the 13th and 18th centuries. Subsequently, he examined the paradigmatic shift in mimesis in the Urdu literary world after 1857 which resulted in the interpretative obscuration of this pre-colonial heritage. Keshavmurthy’s interests include literary translation, pre-colonial literary theory and culture, Mughal urban history and literary modernity in Urdu. Besides the book manuscript based on his doctoral thesis, he is also preparing a book of translations into English from 16th, 17th and 18th century Persian poets. Keshavmurty’s “Finitude and the Authorship of Fiction: Muhammad 'Awfi's Preface to his Chronicle Lubab alalbab (The Piths of Intellect)” was published in Arab Studies Journal (2011).

Why do we take Pleasure in Representations? An Answer from eighteenth century Indo-Persian Literary Criticism

During his Zukunftsphilologie Fellowship, Keshavmurthy will focus on one of the projects comprising the first part of his dissertation, arguing that in the pre-colonial Persianate world a poet’s life was conceived as an effect of his poetry, of the meanings he made, rather than preceding it – as from the late 19th century onwards – as pre-poetic “experience”. Simultaneously mundane and metaphysical, a poet’s life replicated the logic of double meaning in his texts. Keshavmurthy will argue that the double meaning of the life of Kashmir’s most famous Persian language poet, Ghani Kashmiri (d. 1669), as told over three centuries in biographical dictionaries, is ultimately modeled on the logic of double meaning in his own distiches.