Announcing a special issue from University of Toronto Quarterly
Rabindranath Tagore: Facets of a Cultural Icon
Now available online at: http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/x3tu0018337n/
Announcing UTQ (77:4) highlighting a multifaceted talent and Nobel prize–winner in the field of literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate (in 1913 for literature) can well be deemed a ‘cultural icon’ in the sense that he embodied and articulated an integrated conception of human culture through his charismatic personality and manifold creative works. Tagore’s vision of human life is one that stems from the cultural soil of his native Bengal but opens onto and embraces humanity as a whole, each portion of which remains rooted in its own native cultural soil. Those who find converging in Rabindranath Tagore and his work a dynamic view of how human life actually is and of how it might be yet more authentically human have reason to hope that he and his work may become more widely known and more accurately appreciated worldwide.
To that end, this issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 77.4 Fall 2008, edited by Kathleen and Joseph O'Connell, presents eleven essays by authorities on several aspects of Rabindranath Tagore's immense oeuvre and impact. The contributors provide guidance to those would discover and reclaim Tagore, creative and humane cultural icon that he was and remains, in as authentic and faithful a way as possible, neither confining him in a stultifying orthodoxy of interpretation that he would abhor nor allowing substandard or
tendentious misrepresentations of him and his work to go unchallenged.
Each author draws upon his or her particular expertise to refract and illuminate significant sectors of Tagore’s remarkably complex and productive life and work. Krishna Dutta taps into his letters as a ‘beacon’ to biographers like herself. Kathleen O’Connell and Uma Das Gupta present Tagore, respectively, as innovative educator and pioneer in rural development. Ana Jelnikar explores the personal, cultural and political factors behind W.B. Yeats’s (mis)reading of Tagore, while Giuseppe Flora mines Italian sources to explain the poet’s
tortuous relationship with Italy as it struggled between fascism and liberalism in the 1920s. Anisuzzaman reports on the sometimes acrimonious ‘claiming’ versus ‘disclaiming’ of Tagore in former East Pakistan and current Bangladesh. Saranindranath Tagore (grandnephew of the poet) gives a philosophical exposition and defence of the poet-philosopher’s conception of cosmopolitanism. Mandakranta Bose reflects
on the distinctive quality and problematic fate of Rabindra-nritya, a unique style of modern dance introduced by Tagore. William Radice argues for a new and more insightful way of classifying Rabindra-sangit, the body of Bangla-language songs that Tagore considered the most valuable and enduring of his manifold cultural legacy. Suddhaseel Sen complements Radice’s essay with a detailed analysis of Europeancomposers’ efforts to set to Western music poems of Tagore (in translations). Mahmud Shah Qureshi concludes the issue with an extensive review of literary and assessments of Rabindranath Tagore by Bengali Muslim writers—men and women who shared the language in which the poet was most talented and prolific, Bangla (Bengali), but were of a different religio-communal background.
Articles:
Introduction: Rabindranath
Tagore as ‘Cultural Icon’
Joseph
T. O’Connell and Kathleen M. O’Connell
Tagore's Letters: A
Beacon for Biographers
Krishna Dutta
Freedom, Creativity,
and Leisure in Education: Tagore in Canada, 1929
Kathleen
O’Connell
Tagore's Ideas of
Social Action and the Sriniketan Experiment of Rural Reconstruction, 1922--41
Uma
Das Gupta
W.B. Yeats's (Mis)Reading
of Tagore: Interpreting an Alien Culture
Ana
Jelnikar
Tagore and Italy:
Facing History and Politics
Giuseppe
Flora
Claiming and
Disclaiming a Cultural Icon: Tagore in East Pakistan and Bangladesh
Anisuzzaman
Tagore's Conception
of Cosmopolitanism: A Reconstruction
Saranindranath
Tagore
Indian Modernity and
Tagore's Dance
Mandakranta
Bose
Keys to the Kingdom:
The Search for How Best to Understand and Perform the Songs of Tagore
William
Radice
The Art Song and Tagore:
Settings by Western Composers
Suddhaseel
Sen
Literary Assessments
of Tagore by Bengali Muslim Writers
Mahmud Shah Qureshi
University of Toronto Quarterly
Acclaimed as one of the finest journals focused on the humanities, University of Toronto Quarterly is filled with serious, probing, and vigorously researched articles spanning a wide range of subjects in the humanities. Often the best insights in one field of knowledge come through cross-fertilization, where authors can apply another discipline’s ideas, concepts, and paradigms to their own disciplines. UTQ is not a journal where one philosopher speaks to another, but a place where a philosopher can speak to specialists and general readers in many other fields. This interdisciplinary approach provides a depth and quality to the journal that attracts both general readers and specialists from across the humanities.
Discover Canada’s best-kept literary secret!
Since 1936, University of Toronto Quarterly has devoted an entire issue to Letters in Canada. This annual winter issue of UTQ offers probing evaluations of work by Canadian scholars and by international scholars on Canadian issues. Not restricted by language, reviews include coverage of the year’s creative work by both established and emerging writers in poetry, fiction, drama, and translation, in both English and French. In recent years, the Letters in Canada issue has encompassed over 650 pages and featured the work of more than 200 reviewers, whose informed and thoughtful reviews provide an extensive record of current research in the humanities in Canada. The coverage is complemented with notice of work published internationally on Canadian literature, history, politics, culture, and the arts.
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posted by T Hawkins, University of Toronto Press - Journals