Sara Suleri - Career and Major Works

Career and Major Works

Suleri is a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Her memoir, Meatless Days, is an exploration of the complex interweaving of national history and personal biography which was widely and respectfully reviewed . Her 1992 The Rhetoric of English India was well received in literary circles. One critic, for instance, said recent scholarship by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gauri Viswanathan, and Jacques Derrida has "reformulated the paradigmatic assumptions of colonial cultural studies," and the book was as "important addition to such scholarship." The "unconventionality of some of her selections brings a breath of fresh air to a field prone to turn, time and again, to the same weary list of standard texts." However, an historian took Suleri to task for the "casual manner in which she forms important generalizations without benefit of hard data." As with other deconstructionists, he continued, there are "Pronunciamentos based on unstructured, undisciplined and unresearched observations about the past..." He concludes, that "This is not to say that Suleri's work is totally without substance or that all of her insights are without value. No doubt, she is a sensitive literary critic who would be bored with the kind of detailed monographs historians and ethnographic anthropologists do as a matter of course."