Authors : Rini Dwivedi
Page Nos : 237-240
Description :
The present, highly technological, mechanical and anomic age offers little space for literature in the life of an average individual and prefers leaving it to academia and to those for whom literature is either a passion or a fashion. However, literature both in its traditional and post- modernist sense is not dead in spite of all the Jeremiahs the world has. On the contrary, literature especially contemporary literature, keeps on all the time growing like our sacred banyan tree (the emblem of Allahabad University), Quot
Rami Tot Arborers style. Its practitioners today are quite large and its readers are even larger. And yet literature today is not what it was yesterday. With the theory of textuality gaining more and more ground as against canonicity, contemporary literature has come to occupy more and more grounds against canonicity, contemporary literature has come to occupy more and more space in our life. Its frontiers have been extended to include all kinds of text, philosophical, psychological, legal, cultural, scriptural, lyrical, and ethnographic and so on. Now literature can include bumper stickers, graffiti, music videos
and even reports of various kinds, e.g. reports on Urea Scam, Lakhubhai Cheating case, J.M.M. payoff case, Fodder Scam of Bihar and so on. Literature in this sense becomes “the continuous substance of all human signifying activities†and covers all that seems to invite interpretation or all that “the interpreter sets up as an object for interpreting†(Marshall, 162). This kind of definition is not as radical as it appears to be. Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines literature as “the whole body of writings of a time or place ’’.
Literature thus defined does not exclude either canon or literature in traditional sense. Like the condition government of fourteen parties headed by H.D. Devegowda, it may lead to confusion but seldom to anarchy.
