Synopses & Reviews
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, South Asia Across the Disciplines is a new series jointly published and promoted by University of Chicago Press, University of California Press, and Columbia University Press& mdash;three leading publishers in South Asian studies& mdash;suggesting new routes and innovative methods in South Asian scholarship.
Beginning in the sixth century C.E. and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary practice of poetic simultaneity became the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special dual language to depict disguised or dual characters, and then expanded this unique experiment to narrate simultaneously India's major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Originally found only in Sanskrit, such dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have dismissed this intricate bitextual technique as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of medieval India's cultural decline. Extreme Poetry proves instead that, far from being a meaningless pastime, simultaneous narration both transcended and reinvented the limits of Sanskrit literary expression. These poems teased and estranged existing narrative convention and explored the interrelations between the founding texts of their tradition. Through its focus on this practice's far-reaching achievements, Extreme Poetry rewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and reorients our understanding of its aesthetic goals. It also expands contemporary theories of intertextuality, which are largely confined to Western texts and practices.
Synopsis
Beginning in the sixth century C.E. and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary poetic practice was the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special language to depict both the apparent and hidden sides of disguised or dual characters, and then used it to narrate India's major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, simultaneously.
Originally produced in Sanskrit, these dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have long dismissed simultaneous narration as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of cultural decline in medieval India. Yet Yigal Bronner's Extreme Poetry effectively negates this position, proving that, far from being a meaningless pastime, this intricate, bitextual technique both transcended and reinvented Sanskrit literary expression.
The poems of simultaneous narration teased and estranged existing convention and showcased the interrelations between the tradition's foundational texts. By focusing on these achievements and their reverberations through time, Bronner rewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and its aesthetic goals. He also expands on contemporary theories of intertextuality, which have been largely confined to Western texts and practices.