Time, Doubt and Wonder in the Humanities: Between the Tick and the Tock

Contents: Opening words: time, doubt and wonder .1. If this be saddle-time. 2. Precarity against heroic virility. 3. Literature and silence. 4. Rain and revulsion. 5. Linger like moisture within. 6. Consecration in art. 7. Minstrelsy. 8. My rifle, my bible. 9. Expenditure, insolvency and recovery in poetry. 10. Adam, eve and the discrete art of Whiggery. 11. The other Martin Luther. 12. The torah as literature. 13. All flesh is grass. 14. The act of translation: slow rendering of an ache. 15. Creatures in shards: Elem Klimov's come and see. 16. Kojin Karatani's exchange recurrences and isonomic associationism. 17. The lattice of paranoia: university of Delhi, Circa 2017–18. 18. Between the tick and the tock.

Time, doubt and wonder in the humanities addresses a serious lacuna in humanities studies. It affirms our commitment to wonder and adventure in living by confronting the subtext that lies within the manifold worldly, social and political vicissitudes and tribulations. The essays in this volume speak to our times and make sense of the idea of temporality in general by using wonder as an inclusive metaphor, which engulfs fortitude, anguish, joy, providence, submission, precariousness and revulsion. Wonder could lead to curiosity to inspiration to doubt to questioning to indignation to seeking of justice. 

The book offers a benchmark in thinking about why we must take literature and art seriously in times of great political turmoil. It affirms that the shape and contour of literary studies shall depend on how the coming generation maintains a delicate balance among inspiration, doubt and faith.