Mahitosh Mandal

Presidency University, Kolkata · Department of English

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was hailed, in his lifetime, as the most insightful reader of Sigmund Freud and a radical disseminator of Freudian discourse. However, responses to Lacan were not always positive as many also condemn(ed) him as an unoriginal mind, an intellectual impostor, a charlatan, a misogynist, and an arrogant...

Holocaust vs. Popular Culture debates and deconstructs the binary responses to the representation of the Holocaust in European and non-European forms of Popular Culture. The binary is defined in terms of “incompatibility” between the Holocaust and Popular Culture on the one hand and the “universalization” of the Holocaust memory through Popular Cu...

This critical introduction to the volume on Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization is divided into four parts. The first part exhaustively theorizes what the editors describe as the “versus thesis” by explaining the binary responses to the representation of the Holocaust in Popular Culture. This binary is...

Insofar as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is widely considered to be a literary example of postmodernism, it may be worth reflecting on some of the salient features of this cultural movement. Reading Fowles’s text in conjunction with the following ten points could be enriching. It may be noted that ten is an arbitrary number here, that the se...

Ghya Chang Fou is an independently made film, funded by some friends and well-wishers. Despite being screened in various international film festivals, the film was never officially released in the commercial theatres. There could be two reasons behind this. One, Joyraj deliberately does not want the film to become a money-minting product. Those who...

In recent years, we have been witnessing a proliferation of English-language books related to Dalit Studies in general and Dr B R Ambedkar in particular. So much so that, for the benefit of the academic world, a frequent survey of the newly published books has become imperative. With this objective in mind, I intend to offer a short survey of some...

Caste has predominantly been understood as a social problem. It is understood as a form of discrimination embedded in the Hindu society that promotes Brahmanical supremacy which, in turn, is founded on the ostracization and dehumanization of the Dalit subject. The great bulk of the existing scholarship on caste has been dedicated to exploring the h...

This article debunks the myth that Bengal is a casteless land or that Bengalis have no understanding of caste, by excavating, from within a Dalit historiographical framework, the rich and heterogeneous anti-caste politico-intellectual tradition launched and carried forward by the Dalits in colonial Bengal. Due to the paucity of space, it focuses on...

Manohar Mouli Biswas (born 3 October 1943) is a long-time Dalit activist and writer from West Bengal, president of Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha, and vice-president of West Bengal Dalit Sahitya Academy. In this conversation with Mahitosh Mandal, conducted over email and face to face, Mr Biswas talks in-depth about his views on Dalit identity, castei...

This volume provides an overview of Lacan’s significant psychoanalytic theories. It delves into the various ways in which Lacan made sense of the human subject, discusses the clinical structures of psychosis, neurosis and perversion, and uniquely demonstrates the application of Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism through a detailed analysis of John F...

This paper is a psychoanalytic study of “gender myths” as presented in John Fowles's famous novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). It begins by describing Fowles's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and his use of psychoanalytic ideas in constructing fictional characters. The paper subsequently explains how the concept of “postmodern indeterm...

This paper attempts to understand how science is blended with literature in John Donne and Constance Naden, how the blending is a patterned one, and how a new poetics is developed out of this. Along with this is analyzed how literature can become a valuable document for science, especially for recording its reception. Consequently, both the socio-c...