Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
The Body Convulsive: Loss of Consciousness, Visions of the Divine, and Poetry as a Technology of the Self in Early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism
Ishan Chakrabarti
(The University of Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at a set of instances drawn from a variety of early Gauḍīya texts in which people fall unconscious and end up having visions of the eternal līlā. In particular, I examine the role of poetry, as it both causes people to fall unconscious and brings them back to consciousness.
Paper long abstract:
I examine a broad set of instances throughout the early Gauḍīya hagiographic corpus in which a person goes unconscious owing to the effects of extraordinary aesthetic experience (bhāva). I look at what happens to the body and the mind during these moments, focusing on the connection between the mental, affective, and physical responses exhibited. Poetry serves as an important technology of the self in these instances: it can both render people unconscious or help bring them back to consciousness. My discussion details the mechanism by which this technology works. I deal with examples from the Caitanyacaritāmr̥ta, the Karṇānanda, and from various texts written by Kavikarṇapūra.