Abstract:

This talk will give a reading of Maulana Altaf Husain Hali’s (1837–1914) reformist ethic in his Urdu literary criticism. It is part of an attempt to fashion a conceptual terrain of mediation between literary form and historical social values for the study of colonial poetic practices such as the Urdu ghazal. In this attempt, it will also question the validity and historical extent of the two major interpretive, value-producing frameworks used to study Urdu’s poetic tradition as a historical object: homoeroticism (from sexuality studies) and mysticism (from literary hermeneutics).

About the Speaker:

Dr.Shad Naved is Assistant Professor at the School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. He got his Ph.D from University of California, Los Angeles in 2012 in Comparative Literature and has a number of publications related to Gender Studies to his credit.