Sara Suleri Goodyear is Professor of English at Yale University, the founding editor of The Yale Journal of Criticism and on the editorial board of The Yale Review and Transition. As an academic, her fields of interest are listed as “Romantic and Victorian poetry…Edmund Burke…” and her concerns “postcolonial literatures and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law, Urdu poetry.”
Ms Suleri was born in Pakistan, grew up in Lahore, graduated from Kinnaird College, did her Masters in English from PunjabUniversity and a doctorate from Indiana University. She encapsulated memories of her Lahore childhood in her creative memoir Meatless Days (1989), at the heart of which were the tragic accidents that killed her mother and sister. Furthermore, as the daughter of the eminent journalist Z.A. Suleri, she observed political events and political opinions being forged from close quarters and wove the story of Pakistan into her narrative. The book was remarkable for the quality of Suleri’s prose and her use of metaphor to define chapters, and not only marked an important milestone in Pakistani English literature, but is now one of the classical texts of South Asian English literature. She went on to write a critical work The Rhetoric of English India (1992), a rather complicated work, which explores the way English writing was used to perceive and define the subcontinent, from the rhetoric of Edmund Burke to the fiction of Salman Rushdie. The book also includes discussions on Fanny Parkes, Kipling, E.M. Forster and Naipaul.
She lives between Maine and New Haven and has recently published another accomplished memoir Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy about her journalist father. In this brief fax interview with Newsline, she answers a few questions about her books. My novel is that “the novel is not about getting inside but is about showing what happened, without explanation, with “no introductions”
