Department of English

I address the standard question of ethics, “how should one live?,” from the standpoint of literary studies. I am particularly interested in the ethical practice of austerity, in which a person commits to not possessing an object of interest. It is a helpful name for the personal acts of renunciation that many today are taking on in response to some or the other scarcity: dietary restrictions in the face of a drained biome, lifestyle compromises to account for debt, spiritual sacrifices to adapt to existential precarity, so on. Our awareness that these scarcities are politically engineered may well make us doubt the virtue of austerity—it appears to make friends with one’s dispossession rather than oppose it. Still, I want to insist there is more to austerity than self-pacification. To put this more into words, I am tracing its appearance in the writings of M. K. Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, Rabindranath Tagore, Nadine Gordimer, Tsitsi Dangarembga, all the way back to Indic philosophers and poets. I also love painting, and I look forward to taking it up more seriously as my vocation in the next life.