Criticism: Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is a critic, but does not consider himself to be one. He instead declares that he "engages with the author’s worldview" and with the location of the author's history. History is a very large theme that he belives should be heavily in literary critics' minds. He has a similar view to Kavin when he declares that literature was the "primary means of clarifying a bewilderingly large universe of meaning and contexts." Whether it was philosophy or science, Mishra believed that we used literature to explain the world. Similar to Kavin, he also describes literature as being based on a conflict brought up by current events. But what I think Mishra aims to achieve in writing this essay is that we can learn from literature from everywhere and every part of the world, and we should be able to use literary criticism as a means to reveal the imagination and meaning behind the writing. In order for readers to take this away from criticism, Mishra believes that critics must stay close to the texture of social history, while also focusing on aesthetics.

I do agree that literature is a means of understanding the universe we live in from a million different perspectives. I think it's imporant that we read literature from different parts of the world because that it how we achieve an even broader and indepth understanding. If literary critics were to bring these elements into their critiques I think that it would certainly help readers take second looks at the books they're reading and take their reading to another level of understanding. I do, however, somewhat disagree with his statement that the majority of modern literature is based on a social conflict. It's true that we can trace the roots of many books to a social problem, especially most of the books written in Russia during the Cold War (Animal Farm?). But it seems that in literature today, a new level of imagination is being achieved, and its sole purpose is to not represent a conflict in history.

This is extremely important because we can all learn to look into literature as a way to understand the world we live in, and Mishra and Kavin's essay especially help us understand this. Modern literature should represent not simple critiques of the writing but instead focus on the larger theme of the writing and what we can take away from it. I've never read one of Mishra's reviews, but through this essay I imagine that they reveal a complex understanding.