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  1.  20
    "Is It From Your Life? Did This Really Happen?": Amit Chaudhuri’s Acknowledgement of the Autobiographical.Paul Deb - 2024 - In Mukul Chaturvedi (ed.), Life Writing, Representation and Identity: Global Perspectives. London: Routledge.
    Of the various forms of life writing with which the present collection is concerned, I want in this chapter to devote my attention to the genre of the memoir (and so the autobiographical), and its relation to the seemingly sharply contrasting literary genre of the novel (insofar as the former is understood as a mode of writing concerned with the recounting of the facts or reality of a particular human life, and the latter is understood as concerned only with the (...)
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  2. A Chariot Between Two Armies: A Perfectionist Reading of the Bhagavadgītā.Paul Deb - 2021 - Philosophy East and West 71 (4):851-871.
    Interpretations of the ethical significance of the Bhagavadgītā typically understand the debate between Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa in terms of a struggle between consequentialist and deontological doctrines. In this paper, I provide instead a reading of the Gītā which draws on a conception of moral thinking that can be understood to cut across those positions – that developed by Stanley Cavell, which he calls ‘Emersonian Moral Perfectionism’. In so doing, I emphasise how Kṛṣṇa’s consolation of Arjuna can centrally and fruitfully be (...)
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  3. “Did This Really Happen?”: Amit Chaudhuri’s Acknowledgement of the Autobiographical.Paul Deb - 2022 - Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 44 (4):194-203.
    In a recent online lecture, the acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri responded to an accusation that has greeted his fiction since the start of his literary career: that since, as he openly admits, his novels contain people and events that are drawn from his own life, they are better thought of as thinly disguised memoirs—as not really novels at all. In this paper, I discuss this charge by drawing on an account by the philosopher Stephen Mulhall of the work of another (...)
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  4. “I Saw a Different Life. I Can't Stop Seeing It”: Perfectionist Visions in Revolutionary Road.Paul Deb - 2021 - Film-Philosophy 25 (3):251-271.
    In this article, I claim that Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is a recent version of the film genre that Stanley Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman”. Accordingly, my discussion focuses on two key elements of that identification: the film's overriding dramatic and thematic emphasis on conversation; and the central characters’ relation to the wider social and political concerns of America.
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