Jayjit Sarkar

Raiganj College(University College), Department of English, Faculty Member

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Jayjit Sarkar, M.A., PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Raiganj University, India. He is the author of the monograph Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019). He is also the co-editor of volumes like Border and Bordering: Poetics, Politics, Precariousness (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2020) and The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2021), Geographia Literaria: Studies in Earth, Ethics and Literature (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021), The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming, 2022) and A Handbook of Indian Indie Cinema (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2022). Contact: jayjitsarkars@gmail.com

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Papers by Jayjit Sarkar

Asia and Asiabodh

Geographia Literaria: Studies in Earth, Ethics and Literature , 2021

Asia and Asiabodh: Historicality, Ethics and Jibanananda Das’ “Banalata Sen of Natore”

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The Idea of Visva-Bharati: Tagore and Comparative University Studies

The journal of aesthetic education/The Journal of aesthetic education, 2024

Trans, Literature, and Sahitya

Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought , 2023

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Ecofeminism in Two Indian Dystopian Novels

by Jayjit Sarkar and Anik Sarkar

Indian Feminist Ecocriticism , 2022

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The Idea of Visva-Bharati: Tagore and Comparative University Studies

Journal of Aesthetic Education University of Illinois Press, 2024

The idea with which Rabindranath Tagore established Visva-Bharati is different from that of the g... more The idea with which Rabindranath Tagore established Visva-Bharati is different from that of the grounding of Immanuel Kant's "university with condition" or that of Jacques Derrida's "university without condition." The thinking that finally materialized into Visva-Bharati, or rather the "fore-thinking," is an uncanny complex of aesthetics, politics, topolitics, pedagogy, and Tagorean philosophy of the "home" and the "world." There is neither the "conflict" of Kant's essay The Conflict of the Faculties nor Derrida's absolute radicality and radical absoluteness: there is neither Kant's "freedom of the Enlightenment" nor Derrida's "freedom from the Enlightenment." Ranjan Ghosh captures this so-called dichotomy engrossingly in his book Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore. In Tagore's idea of university, we find a "traffic," an exchange of some sort, between nativism and cosmopolitanism, colonial and postcolonial, singularity and plurality, root and rootlessness. Ghosh not only controls the "traffic" in his work but also gives his close reading of the institution and, most importantly, the underlying principle that led to the establishment of the institution. Visva-Bharati was not built upon the principles of a modern university. It did not have the moral responsibility of following the already established norms and regulations or the society at large but had what Ghosh calls a sense of "no-responsibility." Tagore's idea of university was thus built upon the "no-responsibility" toward the old Eurocentric model of pedagogy and the "responsibility" toward creating a new and more reflective model. He employed one set of responsibilities to "counter" another set of responsibilities. This article in a way is a reimagining, a commentary on Ghosh's work on the pedagogical aspects of Visva-Bharati.

In Search of a Pathographical Ecopoetics: A Study of Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Journal of Ecohumanism, 2023

What connects a pathography (an illness narrative) with the school of ecopoetics is poiesis: the ... more What connects a pathography (an illness narrative) with the school of ecopoetics is poiesis: the Greek for “the act of creation”. Pathographical ecopoetics is “creation-with” the natural surroundings during illness. As opposed to Thoreau’s Walden where we find an autobiographical account of one’s relationship with nature, in pathographical ecopoetics the same relationship is unfolded through pathos (the Greek for “pain”) and disease. Illness as a method helps in bracketing out our pre-reflective involvement with the natural surroundings and paves the way for newer ways of understanding nature. As opposed to various other intersections between medicine and ecology, like ecopsychology, ecotherapy or green cure, there is a sense of Keatsian spontaneity and aesthetic wonder in pathographical ecopoetics. Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010) is one such account. Her debilitating illness, with “severe neurological symptoms”, brings her close to an unremarkable wi...

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‘Moving back and forth of the I’: Parasite and Para-site in Beckett’s The Unnamable

Critical Survey, 2022

This article examines how in The Unnamable the unnamed narrator is caught up in a busy traffic of... more This article examines how in The Unnamable the unnamed narrator is caught up in a busy traffic of assemblage(s), ‘moving back and forth of the I’. Beckett places the narrator in a no-place (para-site), metaphorically both as the host and the (un)invited guest – the ‘no-mad’ who (dis)owns the system. The narrator acts, and is simultaneously acted upon. Sometimes it is the (un)invited guest (the outsider), and sometimes the host (the insider). The narrator, therefore, is the ‘it’ (the ‘quasi-object’), reaffirming Serres’ idea that every subject who parasites the other is simultaneously parasited by an-other: thus, moving the system. This curious interplay of host-guest double-bind makes the narrator exi(s)t within movement(s)-in-thought, with possibilities of seeing (para-sight) what Beckett terms as ‘something quite different’.

Derrida and the Art of Embalming: Thanatopraxie in "Tithonus" and A Tale of a Tub

Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida's Glas, this paper seeks to understand the idea of thanatopraxi... more Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida's Glas, this paper seeks to understand the idea of thanatopraxie or embalming in art. It sees thanatopraxie as a strategy to (en)counter the prevalent idea of a "book" as the repository of the "truth" and the "divine." It argues that a work of art can only exist in the world by transforming into "what(ever) remains" of a worka wo-. Thanatopraxie thus, brings down a work from the realm of the transcendental and the divine to the world of banal existence. And, in order to comprehend these maneuverings, this paper looks into "Tithonus" and A Tale of a Tub as texts where the "penetrable openings" are purposely kept open for the transformation of a work (in) to a wo- .

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Books by Jayjit Sarkar

TRANS(IN)FUSION AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT: THINKING IN MIGRATION (2023)

Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration, 2023

Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration engages with Ranjan Ghosh’s conce... more Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration engages with Ranjan Ghosh’s concept of trans(in)fusion and critical theory. Trans(in)fusion reexamines critical thinking and considers how thinking across traditions and systems of thought can generate distinct interpretive experiences. The chapters not only analyze Ghosh’s work but provide insight into the authors’ individual positions and critical approaches.

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Asia and Asiabodh

Geographia Literaria: Studies in Earth, Ethics and Literature , 2021

Asia and Asiabodh: Historicality, Ethics and Jibanananda Das’ “Banalata Sen of Natore”

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The Idea of Visva-Bharati: Tagore and Comparative University Studies

The journal of aesthetic education/The Journal of aesthetic education, 2024