Amardeep

I well understand the point Amardeep is making -- literature has potential use value in multiple contexts separate from one's purely "literary" experience of poetry or fiction -- but quite frankly I do indeed feel that "the 'literary' value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain" because otherwise the word "literary" simply has no meaning.

Literary Study 2009

In both of these views of "what we're doing when we teach literature," literature itself, for itself, is omitted almost entirely, in Amardeep's case grudgingly, in Dr. Crazy's quite easily.

Literary Study 2009

I have an especially hard time seeing how adopting such practices in courses nominally devoted to "literature" adds much to either the understanding of literature or any of the other "regimes of thought" Amardeep mentions.

Literary Study 2009

Under these circumstances, the only real alternatives available are to do something like what Amardeep suggests, using literature for its most palpably utilitarian value as education for life, or to give up literature altogether as subject of academic study and return it to those who find it valuable in, of, and for itself.

Literary Study 2009

Amardeep acknowledges that literature does indeed have singular qualities, which in a way leads him to choose answer 2:

Literary Study 2009

Amardeep wants to continue to teach and study literature because he finds it valuable in and of itself, but he has discovered that the most effective way to reach his students is through a "utilitarian" approach through which literature can provide "lessons for life."

Literary Study 2009

The view of literature represented by Van Oort differs from that expressed recently by Amardeep Singh in a post on his blog, to which I have responded elsewhere.

Literary Study 2009

In a separate post on his own blog, Amardeep explains further:

Literary Study 2009

Amardeep at Sepia Mutiny posts a video of Tamil Canadian journalist Ignatius Sellah talking on CBC which tells a different view, that the Tamil protests in Canada were instigated by the LTTE arm in Canada.

Global Voices in English » Sri Lanka: Abuse, Disbelief And Bitterness Persist 2009

It does, of course, almost necessarily exclude works of literature that are most intensely literary, most deliberately "useless," as Amardeep admits when he says his approach has trouble with "more esoteric, 'problem' texts," such as those of Gertrude Stein or Salman Rushdie.

Literary Study 2009