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Study/Research Objective

I am applying for 2022-2023 Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships. My

area of study as I have laid out elsewhere in the USIEF application is literary theory. I am

very interested in looking at how attitudes shape one’s preferences for a particular theory of

criticism. To call it attitude may look unacademic; however, what I mean is not an attitude

that is altogether unobjective. I may be resonating what Geoffrey Hartman writes about

himself and Harold Bloom in the Preface to the collection of essays Deconstruction and

Criticism, “Though they understand Nietzsche when he says ‘the deepest pathos is still

aesthetic play,’ they have a stake in that pathos: its persistence, its psychological

provenance.” Here I refer to that psychological preference or non-preference. The kind of

research I am doing, as with the PhD thesis on deconstruction theorist Jacques Derrida,

satisfies adventitiously this interest of mine.

Objectives and Methodology of Research

Analysis of the source of knowledge about logocentrism against which my thesis on

deconstruction is conducted is the major objective of my study. The same is drawn from

Derrida’s own writings where he refers to Western logocentric writers. Erich Auerbach’s

essay, ‘Figura’ helps one understand the notion of Christian logocentrism and how it is

different from the logocentric metaphysics Derrida exposes in these writers.

The intertext of influences in a text warrants a deconstructive reading in order to be

exposed precisely to the extent that the ideological evasiveness of language has been put to

use in a piece of writing or speech.

In the trail established by deconstruction significantly marked by its understanding of

the “logos,” a rerouting which is appreciable is that which deals with the acknowledgement

of the benefits of the literary “pathos” which is closely connected with literary sensibilities.

In this regard several of Auerbach’s essays provide an eye-opener. Although he is primarily

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known for his theory of the “mixing of styles,” what Auerbach does implicitly is also to

foreground how a hidden natural selection works in literary choices by writers whom his

essays represent. This could offer a new way of understanding how logocentrism works

through practice. I study Auerbach’s collection of essays Mimesis: The Representation of

Reality in Western Literature and Scenes from the Drama of European Literature for the

purpose.

Conclusion

If nothing exists “outside of context,” as Derrida clarified his statement, literary

criticism coming out of the academia can be best understood through a direct contact with it.

Since both the primary writers I deal with in my thesis have had a connection with US

universities, it appears that it would profit me to have a direct experience of what they

encountered.