Disorienting Dharma by Emily T Hudson

Disorienting Dharma by Emily T Hudson

This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

This is a very rich book in many respects and provides an approach to the study of the MBh and its individual characters that could profitably be taken up by others... this book is very well worth reading and its central thesis about the dissonance created by the disconnect between dharma and duhkha offers new lines of research into both great Sanskrit epics. * Greg Bailey, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *

Before joining the Religion Department at Boston University in 2010, Emily Hudson taught at Harvard University as a lecturer in the history and literature program. Situating herself methodologically at the crossroads of religion and literature, the history of religions, and religious ethics, Hudson's teaching and research interests focus on South Asian literature and literary theory and comparative religious ethics.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199860784
ISBN 10	0199860785
Title	Disorienting Dharma
Author	Emily T Hudson
Series	Aar Religions In Translation
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2013-01-31
Number of pages	276
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable