Vidyan Ravinthiran
Biographic Data
| ID | 935700 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vidyan Ravinthiran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vidyan |
| FAMILY NAME | Ravinthiran |
| SIGNATURE | RAVINTHIRAN V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 5 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 5 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sri Lankan anglophone poetry and modernist painting
The Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka’s first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cognized through an alignment of literary with visual art, became central to Sri Lankan lyric. Although poems in this line take up the argument that Western art is an aesthetic branch of colonialism, their indebtedness to Modernist painting (and Modernist poe…
My Sri Lankan family
My Sri Lankan family Vidyan Ravinthiran (bio) extends its electronic tentacles across the ocean.From the outskirts of Sydney, my cousinSkypes my uncle in Colombo every day.My parents live in Leeds, just two hours away,but here they are, trying to fix the mic.She tells you at length about her divorced friendwho's lonely and whose dog began to bite:"Its name was Willow, it was a long willow-type dog."Crisply, he explains: "It's a greyhound."They're…
(Indian) Verse and the Question of Aesthetics
This is an essay in two halves. I first look at several Indian poets and how they urge the aesthetic dimension to their work. I'll then move onto race and the expectations confronted by poets of colour in the US and the UK. These writers depict alternative complexions—I focus on South Asian brownness—inventively, countering the pressure to perform a stereotyped identity. In explaining this, I'll argue a vision of poetic form, of the aesthetic, an…
And so
And so Vidyan Ravinthiran (bio) there are these moments of uneasewhen words go astray in the familial noiseeven though your parents don't care about raceand I've never been torn, like the kind of brown facethat appears in films, between tradition and the West.Trying to follow what the English mean by class,the tiny jokey disapprovals—as if an irritation danced—in the middle of the sitting room I'm losttrying to follow this conversation about a sc…
Arun Kolatkar’s description of India
Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be like. (“Description”, in this context, isn’t simply a stylistic term — it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar’s descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumb…
Arun Kolatkar’s description of India
Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be like. (“Description”, in this context, isn’t simply a stylistic term — it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar’s descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumb…
Arun Kolatkar’s description of India
Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be like. (“Description”, in this context, isn’t simply a stylistic term — it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar’s descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumb…
My Sri Lankan family
My Sri Lankan family Vidyan Ravinthiran (bio) extends its electronic tentacles across the ocean.From the outskirts of Sydney, my cousinSkypes my uncle in Colombo every day.My parents live in Leeds, just two hours away,but here they are, trying to fix the mic.She tells you at length about her divorced friendwho's lonely and whose dog began to bite:"Its name was Willow, it was a long willow-type dog."Crisply, he explains: "It's a greyhound."They're…
(Indian) Verse and the Question of Aesthetics
This is an essay in two halves. I first look at several Indian poets and how they urge the aesthetic dimension to their work. I'll then move onto race and the expectations confronted by poets of colour in the US and the UK. These writers depict alternative complexions—I focus on South Asian brownness—inventively, countering the pressure to perform a stereotyped identity. In explaining this, I'll argue a vision of poetic form, of the aesthetic, an…
And so
And so Vidyan Ravinthiran (bio) there are these moments of uneasewhen words go astray in the familial noiseeven though your parents don't care about raceand I've never been torn, like the kind of brown facethat appears in films, between tradition and the West.Trying to follow what the English mean by class,the tiny jokey disapprovals—as if an irritation danced—in the middle of the sitting room I'm losttrying to follow this conversation about a sc…
Sri Lankan anglophone poetry and modernist painting
The Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka’s first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cognized through an alignment of literary with visual art, became central to Sri Lankan lyric. Although poems in this line take up the argument that Western art is an aesthetic branch of colonialism, their indebtedness to Modernist painting (and Modernist poe…
Art (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Poetry (5 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · History (3 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (3 works) · Art history (2 works)