Muhamed Riyaz Chenganakkattil

Personal information

First name

Muhamed Riyaz

Last name

Chenganakkattil

Institutional affiliation

Doctoral Fellow,
Religion and Literature
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Narratological interest

Currently, I am a doctoral fellow at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. My research topic is Hajj narratives of Malabar: Transformation of a Ritual into Narration of Sacred Spatial History and Cultural Memory. Throughout the research, I would be using the narratological concepts of how a concrete entity can be transformed into an abstract level of writing and in what quantity narrative can capture the quality of ritual in the narrativization process. Dealing with narrating space and capture the geographical essence of the sacredness in the text has been my part of interest throughout the research. More importantly, the complexities of narrating the sacred time and sacred space in a literary work would be the main endeavor which I attempt to deal with, along with the auto/biographical narratives of Hajj. As part of my doctoral coursework, I have been engaging with narrative theorists, both natural and "unnatural' narratologists, ranging from the Genette, Ricoeur, Richardson, Flaudernik and various others. Very recently, my interest in Unnatural narratology has inspired to deal with two different issues, for which I have written two interesting papers on Redefining We-Narrative and Narrating Collective Subjectivity: Unnaturalness of Hajj Narratives, and Shama’il as Genre of Life Writing: Achronological Narrative Structure and Unnatural Biography; Analyzing 9th Century Arab Writer Tirmidhi’s Shama’il Muhammadiyya. My focus is primarily on the narratological analysis of the non-English works, especially literary corpus which is unattended by the scholars. This quest to know the narrative techniques in the religious literature, I hope, would be a worth-contributing to the world of Narratology.

Country

India