Sara Suleri

Sara Suleri Goodyear, born Sara Suleri, is an author and, since 1983, professor of English at Yale University, where her fields of study and teaching include Romantic and Victorian poetry as well as a recent interest in Edmund Burke. Her special concerns include postcolonial literatures and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law. She was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism, and serves on the editorial boards of YJC, The Yale Review, and Transition.

Early Life and Family

Suleri was born in Pakistan to a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri. She is one of six children.

Education

She received her B.A. at Kinnaird College, in Lahore, in 1974. Two years later, she was awarded an M.A. from Punjab University, and went on to graduate with a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1983.

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 . ^[1] 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." ^[2] 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." ^[3]

Bibliography

• Meatless Days. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, ISBN 9780226779812
• The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 9780226779836
• Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 9780226304014

Notes

1. ^ Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Remembrance of Things Pakistani: Sara Suleri Makes History", Village Voice Literary Supplement, December 1989, pp. 37-38; Candia McWilliam, "Jazzy, Jyoti, Jase and Jane", Rev. of Meatless Days and Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, London Review of Books, 10 May 1990, pp. 23-4; and Daniel Wolfe, "Talking Two Mother Tongues", Rev. of Meatless Days, New York Times Book Review, 4 June 1989, p. 30.
2. ^ Mathew Chacko, South Atlantic Review 58.1 (1993): 113-115. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201105
3. ^ David Kopf, Journal of the American Oriental Society 113.3 (1993): 476-478. http://www.jstor.org/stable/605403

See also

• ZA Suleri
• Sulehria
• Fehmida Riaz
• Bapsi Sidhwa
• Kamila Shamsie
• Maleeha Lodhi
• Parveen Shakir
• Tahira Naqvi
• Lubna Khalid
• Jugnu Mohsin
• Surina Khan
• Zubaida Jalal
• Syeda Abida Hussain
• Sharmila Sen
• Attiya Inayatullah

External links

• Sara Suleri: An Overview

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