Arka Chattopadhyay

Arka Chattopadhyay is associate professor of literary studies and philosophy in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a B.A., M.A., MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He has written his MPHIL thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou and finished his PHD from Western Sydney University on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis with a Dean’s Thesis Prize. He has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett, Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, Gerald Murnane: Another World in this One etc., and journals such as Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Sound Studies and The Harold Pinter Review.  He has co-edited the book, Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature and has guest-edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. Arka is the founding editor of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap-journal.in/) and a contributing editor to Harold Pinter Review. His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real has been published by Bloomsbury Academic UK in 2019. He has recently co-edited a volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya for Bloomsbury India in 2020 and is working on a monograph on Posthumanism, contracted by Orient Blackswan and two edited volumes on Affective Ecologies and Badiou and Modernism. He has won MLA and ACLA travel grants and successfully organised national and international conferences in India and Australia. Arka has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship 2022-2023 at the University of Edinburgh and Harry Ransom Centre Fellowship 2023-2024 at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Research Interests: 20th century literature: modernism and postmodernism, Modern theatre, European avant garde fiction, Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, Bengali vernacular literature and transnationalism, Translation theory, Modern poetry, affect studies

 

Education:

BA: Presidency College, 2007

MA: Jadavpur University, 2009

MPhil: Jadavpur University, 2011

PhD: Western Sydney University, 2016

 

Selected Publications:

2024
BOOK
1. Adhunik tatwobiswa ebong biswasahityer gronthipath [Nodular readings in critical theory and modern world literature], Kolkata: Boibhashik Prokashoni, Jan. 2024.
BOOK CHAPTERS
1.  “Indian Theatres of the Absurd: Cultural Politics of Transformation”, in The Routledge companion to absurdist literature, DOI: 10.4324/9781003422730-52,
New York: Routledge, May 2024.
2. “Badiou, Lacan and Mathematical Modernisms”, in Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (co-editor Arthur Rose) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, May 2024, pp. 66-80.
3. “The poem and its audiences”, (co-authored with Anuparna Mukherjee) in The Cambridge companion to the poem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249-264, Jun. 2024.
4. “Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s Bharotborsho: sexuality beyond nation-state’s control”, in Engaging with a nation: representations of India in the 21st century, New York: Routledge, pp. 140-150, Jul. 2024.
EDITED VOLUME
1. Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (co-editor Arthur Rose) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, May 2024.

 

 

2023

BOOK
Jacques Lacan: Tattwe o Proyoge Monobishleshon [Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice], Kolkata: Boibhashik Prokashoni.
CO-EDITED VOLUME
Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Ireland and India between home and the world”, Journal of World Literature 8:3, pp. 337-355.
“Oedipus Rex and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis: A Tragedy of Desire and Otherness.” Filozofski Vestnik, 44(1), 75–95.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Travelling on: Bengali and English literatures of transnational worlding,” in Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-nation and Beyond. New York: Routledge. 
“Trans-Image-Thinking of Multiplicity: Ranjan Ghosh with Alain Badiou and Gerald Murnane,” in Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration: London: Lexington Books.

 

2022

JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Logical Space in Lacan: From Poe’s Letter to Valdemar’s Body”. S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 13 (2022), pp. 119-137.

 “Materialism of Numbers in J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus.”Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (online first, October 29, 2022). 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Tattooing terminable interminable: psychoanalysis, corporeal marking and literature”, in Tattooed bodies: theorizing body inscription across disciplines and cultures, Cham-Switzerland: Springer Nature, pp. 265-284, 2022.

“Re-Writing the Psychotic Other of Author-Function in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake,” in Literary Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 93-106, 2022. 

 

 

2021

JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Psychoanalysis, corporeality and haptics in Covid-19 times”, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 16, no. 2, 2021.

“Lacan, Calvino and Logics of the One”, Jadavpur University English Studies 33 (2019),pp. 33-48,  published in 2021. 

“From Entanglements to Appropriations: Mathematics with Modernist Literature”, Modernism/modernity 28:1 (2021), pp. 181-187.

“Pinter in the time of Pandemic: Reflections on Medical Metaphors in A kind of Alaska”, The Harold Pinter Review, 5 (2021), pp. 4-9.

 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Arundhati Roy and the ministry of democratic ghosts”, in State of democracy in India: essays on life and politics in contemporary times, New Delhi: Primus Books, pp. 538-558, 2022, ISBN: 9789391144999.

 

2020

JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Mathematical possibilities in modernism: can literature be a system?”, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.202001.13, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 295-316, Jan. 2020.

“Is there a parallax in the mind? Samuel Beckett and distance in the psychic archive”, Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1729850, Feb. 2020.

 

EDITED VOLUME

Bhattacharya, Sourit; Chattopadhyay, Arka and Sengupta, Samrat, Nabarun Bhattacharya: aesthetics and politics in a world after ethics, London: Bloomsbury, Sep. 2020, ISBN: 9789388630504.

 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Memory, Image and Reading Traces of the Infinite: Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books” in Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One, ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020.

“Unworlding world literature: or how Godot travels from a country road to the world”, in Samuel Beckett as World Literature, eds. Thirthankar Chakraborty, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez, New York: Bloomsbury, Jul. 2020, ISBN: 9781501358814.

“Machine, bio-politics and death in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s fiction”, in Nabarun Bhattacharya: aesthetics and politics in a world after ethics, London: Bloomsbury, Sep. 2020, 9789388630504.

“Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change” in Beckett and Politics, eds. William Davies and Helen Bailey. London and New York: Palgrave, 2020. 9783030471101

 

2019

JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Harold Pinter’s aging male speakers: affect of exhaustion and metaphors of agency”, The Harold Pinter Review, DOI: 10.5325/haropintrevi.3.1.0001, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-13, Jun. 2019.

“I am Jack the ripper, a golden eagle: ethical alterity and dangers of narrative travel in world literature”, Interventions, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1547207, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 35-53, Jan. 2019.

“Ontology of sound in Harold Pinter’s radio drama”, Sound Studies, DOI: 10.1080/20551940.2019.1652021, pp. 1-14, Sep. 2019.

 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“How to mourn the present: fiction, memory, and mourning in Paul Auster’s man in the dark and John Banville’s ancient light”, in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, ed. Jean-Michel Rabate, DOI: 10.4324/9781003002727, London and New York: Routledge, Nov. 2019, ISBN: 9781003002727.

 

MONOGRAPH

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

 

Work Experience:

Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, (Nov 2017 to present)

Undergraduate Tutor, Western Sydney University, Sydney, (2015 – 2016)

Guest Faculty, Lady Brabourne College, Kolkata, (2012 – 2 months)

Guest Faculty, Vidyasagar College, Kolkata, (2010 – 2012)

Guest Faculty, Presidency University, Kolkata, (2009 – 2011)