engleski

'Tagore Syndrome': A Case Study of the West's Intercultural (Mis)readings

The case of Rabindranath Tagore is taken as a representative example of the way the West approaches non-Western literatures and, secondly, of the way its critical decisions influence the critical stance in the latter ambiences. In India itself, Tagore was a well-established, but simultaneously a controversial author, when Yeats wrote his famous preface to Tagore's own translation of Gitanjali and saw to its promotion, which eventually made Tagore the first non-European to become a Nobel laureate for literature. The most prestigious literary award in the world turned Tagore into a star overnight and, equally dubiously, secured him in the literary establishment in his homeland. The initial enthusiasm, however, much too soon slackened and gave way even to not infrequent denials of Tagore's kind of poetry (at least outside India). The short survey of Tagore's rise and fall in the West is taken in the paper only as a starting point for examining the mechanisms backing such a trajectory. Attention is given to the repeating model of non-Western authors coming into favour only due to the mediation by a Western author ; to the questionability of criteria involved in the process and its capriciousness ; to the felt and still existing need of Western literature to renew itself, hence reaching out for an Other, but eventually recoiling onto itself ; to some of the reasons for such a situation (like forced readings unsupported by genuine desire to learn and change) ; to harnessing and/or rejecting the Other ; to the ways the West shapes non-Western literary (and not only literary) taste, etc. Essentially, the paper warns of the implicit dangers in the Western practice of either repudiating the Other or appropriating it as a matter of fashion/curiosity/cultural correctness.

Tagore, Western, non-Western, literary criteria, intercultural, exotic

17, 9 kartica teksta