Peer Webinar (chapter 1) organized by the Department of English

Peer Webinar is a novel initiative taken by the Department of English as an attempt to encourage academic dialogue and widen research perspectives amongst the members of the faculty in the department of English. The final semester students of M.A English are also included as audience in order to encourage research aptitude and familiarize them with research methodology. As a part of this ongoing regular process, the Department will be organising a peer webinar each month where a member of the faculty will present their research papers in front of the other teachers of the Department and the final semester students of M.A English.  

The first chapter of the departmental Peer Webinar was organized by the Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College on 29.11.2021 from 7.00 p.m. In this session, Dr. Suchandra Chakravarty, Associate Professor, Department of English delivered a presentation entitled “This gives life to thee: Between the Performative and Performances”. Dr. Chakravarty has her specialization in Romantic literature and has presented papers in this area at different national and international seminars. She has also published variously in different academic books and journals.

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Dr. Chakravarty’s presentation explored various performative renditions of Sonnet No. 18 by William Shakespeare. She focused on the changing significances of verbal utterance based on who the listener is. Her paper delved into the performative aspect of the printed word. Originally composed as a personal poem dedicated to the beauty of the beloved, Sonnet 18 asserts the timelessness of the beloved’s beauty and seeks to immortalize her through the verse. Dr. Chakravarty’s presentation demonstrated how the authorial intention is subordinated to the performative aspect through the diverse motives bridging spatial, racial and temporal distances and defining the subject-position of the performer. She demonstrated the changing nuances of the performative process through videos of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 recited by Alexis Rosinsky, Sir John Gielgud, Michael York, Al Pacino and David Tennant, Lorna Laidlaw and Jay Leibowitz. Her presentation reopened new vistas of the postmodernist assertion challenging the authority of the author-writer over the written word. The presentation was followed by a lively interactive session.