Reading Alfred Korzybski through Inter-Theoretic Explorations
Indian and Western


TRS Sharma

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The present study on Alfred Korzybski (AK), and his non Aristotelian General Semantics (GS ), as theorized and practiced by its founder and his followers, is arranged in two main parts. While the first part deals with the Western language thinkers in the light of GS - thinkers more or less contemporary to AK such as Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Frege, Bakhtin, F R Leavis and others, the second part considers in the perspective of GS the Indian language thinkers such as, to name a few, the Buddhist Nagarjuna and Dinnaga and the Hindu thinkers like Aadi Shankara and Bhartrhari. While the Korzybskian discourse based on premises of negation anticipates on the one hand the modern/post-modern trends in Western critical endeavors, on the other it quietly spreads its 'Indra's net' to gather/reflect the scintillating images of Indian language theories, and their correlations with the physicist's cosmological reflections. Another fascinating side of GS , when considered as political philosophy, opens up, incidentally, the Indian socio-political scene, the elite student movements on university campuses, and the many colored notion of secularism as preached and practiced by ideologues and politicians. General Semantics commands an 'implicate order,' which is 'vast and contain multitudes'; it accommodates literary episodes, poems mystical and otherwise, which are used in many places in the present discourse, so designed as to strengthen and blend into the mainstream narrative. The book may be used by the scholars in the humanities and social sciences all over the world as a reference tool for comparative studies.


TRS SHARMA has taught literatures in English in the universities of Delhi, Alberta (Canada), Annaba (Algeria) and Kakatiya. He was Senior Academic Fellow and Deputy Director at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad (1987-89). His published works include Poetic Style in Robert Frost (Humanities Press, New Jersey, and Macmillan India, 1981), Tale of the Glory-Bearer (Penguin Classics, India, 1994), a verse translation of the medieval Kannada classic Yashodhara Carite by Janna, and Toward an Alternative Critical Discourse (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2000), outcome of the work he did on Indian Aesthetics under an IIAS Fellowship. He is Chief Editor of the Sahitya Akademi's three volume Ancient Indian Literature: An Anthology (2000). He has also edited a collection of essays on the Mahabharata for the Sahitya Akademi (2009). His recent work Dialogics of Cultures in Ancient Indian Literatures was published by the IIAS , Shimla (2014).

 
 
ISBN 978-93-82178-26-2             2018      200 pages      Rs. 600 (hb)