NEGOTIATING TOTALITIES 59 categories that it takes for granted and the tactics it deploys in a world dominated by the demands of a practical rationality. Its culture-contingent nature prompts us to examine its hegemonic part in the production and reproduction of given social arrangements. The significance of such ^ study lies precisely in suggesting the ways in which magazine fiction mobilizes popular knowledge to think through contemporary social circumstances of Indian society, caught as it is in the nexus of 'tradition' and 'modernity'. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. I thank Sasheej Hegde for critical comments on this formulation. 2. Stuart Hall, 1981, cited in J.Caughie, 'Popular Culture: Notes and Revisions' in C. MacCabe (ed.), High Theory/Low Culture, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986. 3. C. Geertz, Local Knowledge, Basic Books, New York, 1983, p. 57. 4. See D. Morley, 'Cultural Transformations: The Politics of Resistance', in H. Davis and P. Walton (ed.), language. Image, Media, Baisi Blackwell, London, 1984. 5. See, for instance, T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Basil Blackwell, London, 1985; and P. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London/Boston, 1978. 6» See J. Caughie, 1986, op. cit. 7. See F. Jameson, 'Ideology, Narrative Analysis, and Popular Culture', review article in Theory and Society, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1977, pp. 543-59. 8. J. Frow, Marxism and Literary History, Basil i Blackwell, London, 1988, p. 22. SEEMANTHINI NIRANJANA Research Scholar Dept. of Sociology Bangalore University