Explaining his choice of twenty-six writers for his book, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), Harold Bloom, American literary critic, writes in his preface thus: “The book studies twenty-six writers, necessarily with a certain nostalgia, since I seek to isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in our culture.” Borrowing the words of W B Yeats, Bloom goes on to lament the fall in the aesthetic value of literature and the decline in the academic standards over the years: “Things have fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘the learned world.’” Though Bloom says that he is not interested in “mimic cultural wars,” he does give vent to his disappointment at “our current squalors”: “The study of Western literature will . . . continue, but on the much more modest scale of our current Classics departments. What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.”

Given Bloom’s lifelong quest to create a canon of literature—of what should be considered great and what shouldn’t—and his objection to cultural studies as against literary studies, to reading literary texts in relation to wider social and political contexts, and to what he considers the insidious influence of feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, new historicists, deconstructionists, and semioticians whom he dubs the “School of Resentment,” it is anybody’s guess how he would have felt when he came to know that American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

When the Swedish Academy announced on October 13, 2016 that American singer-songwriter and a popular face of the sixties’ counterculture Dylan would be awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” it left everyone stunned, including Dylan himself. Though Dylan’s name had been on the nomination list every year since 1996, thanks evidently to the presence of a few loyal Dylan fans among the qualified nominators, nobody seriously thought that Dylan was a contender for the top literature prize. For, no one till then considered the folk-rock-blues-gospel output of Dylan “poetry,” much less “literature.”

Defending the contentious choice, Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, who made the announcement of the coveted prize to Dylan, said in an interview, “He [Dylan] can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition.” Yet, it is doubtful whether even the dyed-in-the-wool Dylan loyalists would prefer reading a book of his lyrics to listening to his albums. For, in this case, the music props up the words and gives them prominence, and without that music, the words sound distant, dissonant.

But then the question is not whether Dylan’s lyrics have any merit in them; the question is whether the lyrics of popular songs, however good they may be, can be classified as a genre of literature. Traditionally, literature referred to works of superior qualities belonging to the major genres such as poetry, drama, novel, short story, and essay, as distinguished from ordinary run of written works. However, in modern times, as popular culture increasingly jostles for space with high culture, many works that cannot be classified in the main literary genres, nevertheless boasting excellence of writing and artistic merits, seek to question the aesthetic hierarchy and reinvent the literary canon, resulting in the inclusion of such genres as graphic novel and Cli-Fi—short for Climate Fiction—in literature.

And by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dylan, who calls himself “a song-and-dance man” and whose oeuvre includes, among others, a clutch of notable protest songs that draw one’s attention to issues like wars, racism, civil rights, and social inequities, the Swedish Academy has pushed the envelope, so to speak, confirming Bloom’s worst fear—”When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse [eminent French artist] go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of the Guerrilla Girls [a radical feminist activist group that agitates for women’s equality in the art world]?”

Conversely, to be fair to the Swedish Academy, while Alfred Nobel’s will merely states that the literature prize shall be awarded annually “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction,” the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation expressly spell out, “The term ‘literature’ shall comprise not only belles-lettres but also other writings which, by virtue of their form and style, possess literary value.” So there.

Of course, it could be debated interminably whether Dylan’s lyrics possess any “literary value,” but that’s not going to stop the popular songwriters across the world from including Nobel Prize in their revised wish list. And who knows, having gone beyond the established notion of what constitutes “literature,” the Swedish Academy might as well be considering adding movie scripts, television pilots, and the like to what it views as “writings which possess literary value,” especially given that the modern generation, used to scanning and skimming, is not that into serious reading. After all, as Isaac D’Israeli puts it presciently in his book Curiosities of Literature (London: Edward Moxon, 1839), “Different times, then, are regulated by different tastes. What makes a strong impression on the public at one time ceases to interest it at another . . . and every age of modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by dividing it into its periods of fashionable literature.”

The papers presented in this issue have relevance to, among others, a few of the topics mentioned, en passant, above: counterargument against reductive attempts at viewing literature as mimesis of lifeworld (Roghayeh Farsi and Vida Dehnad); whether “the literary can still do something” as regards teaching ethics (Sharada Allamneni); the absurdity of modern human existence and the attendant ecological impoverishment (Zeeshan Ali); the displacement and disruption of identity of second-generation immigrants and their divided relation to space (Swarnita Sharma, Jaya Dwivedi, and Sheela Tiwari); the subaltern identity of Indian Dalits and the unequal power equations of the caste-conscious society (Rajeshwar Mittapalli); the subversion of the binaries of masculinity and femininity and the questioning of patriarchal narration through the reworking of popular folk and fairy tales (Preeti Bhatt and Ritu Pareek); the evolution and transition of a writer’s worldview as she negotiates the cultural and literary changes of her times (Aswathi Velayathikode Anand and Srirupa Chatterjee); the pattern of influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the school of surrealism on the short stories of two canonical writers hailing from different milieus (Azra Ghandeharion and Milad Mazari); the role of sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies in honing English skills for employability (Jayagowri Shivakumar and Geetha V Sharma); and the art of literary translation and what it involves (V V B Rama Rao).

R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor