English

Critical conversations about V.S. Naipaul often discount the centrality of his Hindu Brahminism to his anglicized authorial persona. This gap is partly due to Naipaul’s own articulated distaste for Hindu religious practice as obscure and archaic. Examining his first travelogue set in India (An Area of Darkness, 1964), this talk argues that Naipaul's rejection of Hinduism does not necessarily imply a rejection of caste. Rather, he transforms his caste identity into a modern, global product by...

Dan Sinykin is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (Oxford 2020), Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia 2023), and, with Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2025). He is working on a manuscript about the rise of, and alternatives to, Zionism in the Pale of Settlement. His talk will be titled "The Novel in a Time of Textpocalypse."