New Books in Language
412 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books
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Episodes
The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
July 31, 2023 21:43 - 16 minutesMany books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought...
Toril Moi, "Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
July 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest is Toril Moi, whose book Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 2017) returns to three twentieth-century figures in ordinary language philosophy to renew how we think about style and argumentation. Revolution of the Ordinary brings together a diverse archive of primary sources, from the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar to the 1970s TV show All in the Family. I am excited to welcome Toril to the podcast toda...
The Art of Translation: A Discussion with Anne Birkenhauer Molad
July 22, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesTranslation is a mysterious process that combines the elements of writing – rhythm and voice, meaning, structure and nuance – with the challenge of problem-solving. The American writer Harry Mathews said, “translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing, since it demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech.” Anna Birkenhauer-Molad is an award-winning translator and teacher of literary translation, whose work has brought some of ...
Amir Sedaghat, "Translating Rumi Into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond" (Routledge, 2023)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAmir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative questions from translation to audience reception using translation studies and theories of semiotics. The book addresses linguistic and pragmatic questions of translations, such as how text, gender, language, and lexic...
Tom Mustill, "How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesWhat if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication. “When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size.” On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend just off the coast of California....
The Eternal Letter: Two Millennia of the Classical Roman Capital
June 20, 2023 12:48 - 15 minutesThe fiftieth anniversary of Helvetica, the most famous of all sans serif typefaces, was celebrated with an excitement unusual in the staid world of typography and culminated in the release of the first movie ever made starring a typeface. Yet Helvetica's fifty-year milestone pales in comparison with the two thousandth anniversary in 2014 of Trajan's Column and its famous inscription--the preeminent illustration of the classical Roman capital letter. For, despite the modern ascendance of the s...
Philip Kirby and Margaret J. Snowling, "Dyslexia: A History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
June 03, 2023 08:00 - 16 minutesIn 1896 the British physician William Pringle Morgan published an account of “Percy,” a “bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others of his age.” Yet, in spite of his intelligence, Percy had great difficulty learning to read. Percy was one of the first children to be described as having word-blindness, better known today as dyslexia. In Dyslexia: A History (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Philip Kirby and Margaret Snowling chart a journey that begins with Victorian...
Nick Enfield on Language, Influence, and Science Communications
June 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Nick Enfield, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney for Language Research and the Sydney Initiative for Truth. We talk about communication as you think it is and also, about communication as it really is. Enfield is the author of Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022). Nick Enfield : "Every scientist does need to be mindful of the power of language to influence — because we always are influenci...
James Paul Gee, "What Is a Human?: Language, Mind, and Culture" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
May 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of James Gee, Regents' Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. We talk about too much communication, about too much specialization, and about too much narrativization. We also talk about his books Introducing Discourse Analysis: From Grammar to Society (Routledge, 2018) and What Is a Human?: Language, Mind, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). James Gee : "It is absolutely crucial that the early-career r...
The International Association of Sanskrit Studies
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesThe newly-elected first female president of the The International Association of Sanskrit Studies, Dr. Dipti Tripathi discusses Association’s genesis, mandate, and potential in honour of its 50th year. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium mem...
Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
May 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, a...
Alexander Jabbari, "The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's most significant yet understudied lingua francas. From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritag...
Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutes"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing...
The Evolution of Language
March 11, 2023 21:00 - 37 minutesSamuel Jay Keyser, Editor-in-Chief of Linguistic Inquiry, has shared a campus with Noam Chomsky for 40-odd years via MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. The two colleagues sat down in Mr. Chomsky's office to discuss ideas on language evolution and the human capacity for understanding the complexities of the universe. The unedited conversation was recorded on September 11, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium me...
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, "Decolonizing American Spanish: Eurocentrism and the Limits of Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
March 04, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesJeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisical approach US institutions take towards Spanish language content and research and makes a strong argument to follow the Puerto-Rican model which sees greater opportunity, equality, and sophistication in multilingual academic research. About his book: Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments i...
The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesIn this episode, author Ryan Milner talks to Chris Gondak about the rise of the internet meme, and the five logics that factor into the foundation, growth, and success of a meme. Internet memes--digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection--are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting ...
Thomas Kelly, "Bias: A Philosophical Study" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it is deployed frequently and in different contexts. For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions, and biased people. But we also talk about bias as a feature of certain frames of mind, habits, dispositions, and mental processes. In most of these contexts, bias is seen as a kind of failing or a bad-making feature. Attributions of bias are hence often accusatory, or at least a matter of negativ...
Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesBernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes. In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early ac...
Philippe Schlenker, "What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything" (MIT Press, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything (MIT Press, 2022), Philippe Schlenker takes readers on tour of meaning, from the animal kingdom to human culture, arguing that semantics should be taken to have a wide range of applications. He takes on bird song and primate calls, classical music and sign language, predicate logic and scalar implicatures. Throughout, he demonstrates the success of the field of semantics in explaining how human languages—spoken and signed—have rules for ...
Nathan Vedal, "The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge" (Columbia UP, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, ...
Jennifer Clary-Lemon and David M. Grant, "Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesDecolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2022) brings together emerging and established voices at the nexus of new materialist and decolonial rhetorics to advance a new direction for rhetorical scholarship on materiality. In part a response to those seeking answers about the relevance of new material and posthuman thought to cultural rhetorics, this collection initiates bold conversations at the pressure points between nature and culture, Indigenous and...
Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesIt seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting, philosophically, about the unsayable? And if if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to (if not say something about) it? In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues...
Robert J. Dostal, "Gadamer's Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
February 07, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesIn Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic (Northwestern University Press, 2022), Robert J. Dostal provides a comprehensive and critical account of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, arguing that Gadamer’s enterprise is rooted in the thesis that “being that can be understood is language.” He defends Gadamer against charges of linguistic idealism and emphasizes language’s relationship to understanding, though he criticizes Gadamer for too often ignoring the role...
Lois Presser, "Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences" (U California Press, 2022)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesHarm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researc...
Dalal Abo El Seoud, "Fish, Milk, Tamarind: A Book of Egyptian Arabic Food Expressions" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)
January 18, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesIn Fish, Milk, Tamarind: A Book of Egyptian Arabic Food Expressions (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Dalal Abo El Seoud presents 100 commonly used Egyptian food expressions. Can you guess what Egyptians mean when they say that something is "a peeled banana" or that someone is "sleeping in honey" or has "turned the sea to tahini"? You may find the answers quite unexpected when you open the pages of this delightful giftbook featuring some one hundred popular food-inflected phrases an...
Edmund Leach on Roman Jakobson's Contributions to Linguistics
December 30, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesIn this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear the1982 Gallatin Lecture, in which Sir Edmund Leach discussed the work of Roman Jakobson, who he met in 1960, at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Jakobson was one of the pioneers of structural linguistics, and a major influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. He taught at Harvard from 1940 until his retirement in 1967. Leach was a British social anthropologist, and the provost of King's College, Cam...
Anatoly Liberman, "Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesThree centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (U Minnesota Press, 2023) is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the...
The World Sanskrit Conference: A Discussion with McComas Taylor
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesMcComas Taylor discusses the upcoming 18th World Sanskrit Conference January 9-13, 2023. The conference is held online. All are welcome to register here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm...
Michelle R. Boyd, "Becoming the Writer You Already Are" (Sage, 2022)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesBecoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the ...
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a ...
Jane Stevenson, "Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period" (Brill, 2022)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesJane Stevenson’s newest book, Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2022), tracks the history and historiography of women Latinists in the early modern period. She relates how the first early modern women Latinists lived in mid-fourteenth century Italy, and were educated as diplomats. By the fifteenth century, other upper-class women were educated in order to perform as prodigies on behalf of their city. Both strands of education for women spread to other European countries in th...
Hilan Bensusan, "Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded as a chapter in the critique of metaphysics. Bensusan articulates a metaphysical view of the other – both human and non-human, in what Meillassoux calls 'the great outdoors' – that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. He develops an innovative account of perception...
4.6 Translation is the Closest Way to Read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesIn our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the boo...
Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, "Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation" (Tilted Axis Press, 2022)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesFrantz Fanon wrote in 1961 that 'Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,' meaning that the violence of colonialism can only be counteracted in kind. As colonial legacies linger today, what are the ways in which we can disentangle literary translation from its roots in imperial violence? In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), twenty-four writers and translators from across the world share their ideas and practices for disrupting and decolonising transl...
James Griffiths, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" (Zed Books, 2021)
November 15, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesAs globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language (Zed Books, 2021), James ...
Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, "Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity" (Routledge, 2022)
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to be true are also necessarily true – true not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity (Routledge, 2022), Tristan Grotvedt Haze revisits the concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a m...
92 Janet McIntosh on "Let's Go Brandon," QAnon and Alt-Right Language (EF, JP)
November 03, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesElizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words." The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They specul...
Online Sanskrit Study Resources
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesA conversation with Michael Fiden about University of Texas at Austin’s new open access online resource for second-year Sanskrit students, either for self-study or as a supplement to instruction. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h...
Nirmalangshu Mukherji, "The Human Mind Through the Lens of Language: Generative Explorations" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSome time, millenia ago, people began using sounds: to coordinate, to solve problems, to think. Explaining this leap—from non-linguistic beings to language-users—Nirmalangshu Mukherji argues that we shouldn’t focus only on language. In The Human Mind through the Lens of Language: Generative Explorations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Mukherji draws on resources like René Descartes’ conception of mind, proposing that the human mind is fundamentally different than animal cognitive systems. He gro...
Michael Keevak, "On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)
October 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. ...
Eric Hobsbawm on "Literacy and the Tower of Babel"
October 10, 2022 08:00 - 23 minutesIn this episode from the Vault, we hear from historian Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent visitor at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His talk, Literacy and the Tower of Babel, took place in November 1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Carles Prado-Fonts, "Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
October 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. H...
4.3 Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesYan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in Eng...
Bo Mou, "Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy" (Brill, 2018)
September 22, 2022 14:45 - 1 hourContributors to Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and semantics of the Chinese language with philosophy of language, from the classical Chinese and contemporary analytic Anglophone traditions. The result is an anthology which explores what Mou calls “the constructive-engagement” model for doing philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about the b...
Raúl Pérez, "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy" (Stanford UP, 2022)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHaving a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order ...
4.1 “Sometimes I’m just a little disappointed in English”
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesA novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfect start to Season 4 of Novel Dialogue. Our first themed season is devoted to translation in all its forms: into and out of English and also in, around, and over the borders between criticism and fiction. We talk to working translators, novelists who write in multiple languages, and we even time travel to discover older novels made new again in t...
Lucía Fernández-Amaya, "A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication" (Brill, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesDigital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication (Brill, 2022) offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, and seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, mult...
Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, "Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesOne of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech, hate speech, disinformation, propaganda campaigns, incitement of violence on the internet, and, in particular, speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors--including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon ...
Asad Q. Ahmed, "Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia" (U California Press, 2022)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesIn his dense yet delightful new book Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), Asad Ahmad examines in layered detail the textual and commentarial tradition on the discipline in logic in early modern and modern South Asia, while constantly connecting his study to broader Muslim intellectual currents beyond South Asia. Focused on the seventeenth century text Sullam al-‘Ulum (The Ladder of the Sciences) by Muhibulla...
Michael Sidney Fosberg, "Nobody Wants to Talk about It: Race, Identity, and the Difficulties in Forging Meaningful Conversations" (Incognito, 2020)
August 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Nobody Wants to Talk About It: Race, Identity, and the Difficulties in Forging Meaningful Conversations (Incognito, 2020), Michael Sidney Fosberg draws on twenty years of experience leading conversations about race to encourage readers to share their story, get comfortable with discomfort, and disagree without being disagreeable. Fosberg's one-man play Incognito is always followed by an open and honest conversation about race and identity. Fosberg provides time-tested strategies for bridgi...