New Books in Literary Studies
1,623 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books
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Episodes
Book Chat: Oceanic Writing
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English a...
Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing
March 07, 2023 21:00 - 16 minutesIn this episode, Martin Erwig show us how we can find computational concepts inside some of our favorite stories. Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that man...
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 2
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesExplore the moral tensions and dilemmas that Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin force their audiences to confront, especially in the storylines of their most notable political leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
The Los Angeles Review of Books: A Conversation with Michelle Chihara and Annie Berke
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesToday I talked to Michelle Chihara, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Annie Berke, the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. We talked about book reviewing in the age of the Internet and LA literary culture. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
On Chaim Grade’s "The Yeshiva"
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourChaim Grade’s novel, Tsemakh Atlas: Der Yeshivah, was originally published in Yiddish in the late 1960s. Considered a landmark of modern Yiddish literature, the novel now known as The Yeshiva, captures the inner life of the pre-Holocaust Lithuanian yeshiva tradition, with protagonists who are steeped in the pietistic Musar movement and tormented by religious doubt. Yehudah DovBer Zirkind is a research fellow at the Herzog Institute for the Study of Hasidism and a graduate student of Yiddish l...
Ben Davies et al., "Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no historical account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels a...
Priscilla Gilman, "The Critic's Daughter: A Memoir" (Norton, 2023)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesGrowing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations--about her parents' h...
Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos, "Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures" (Manchester UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesHelen Solterer and Vincent Joos edited volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Manchester UP, 2022) examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, arts, and literatures of the places where they settled. They contributed to these cultures and econo...
Charlie Samuelson, "Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues th...
Marilyn Migiel, "Veronica Franco in Dialogue" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSince the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural presence in sixteenth-century Venice. In Veronica Franco in Dialogue (U Toronto Press, 2022), Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco’s rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fou...
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 1
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesDiscover the real-life history that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeare’s history plays, and learn the distinctive ways in which Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin each transform history into art Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Anthony Bale, "Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMargery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quot...
Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini, "Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesLet’s talk about zombies! Scholars Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have produced an engaging and important analysis of the idea of zombies, and how and why these particular monsters are omnipresent in American popular culture, especially these days. Zombies both represent and present ideas about the world in which we live, and Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines these connections, helping us consider our relationship to this vision of the “undead” and why th...
Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, "Taiwanese Literature as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOwing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout ...
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, ...
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Part 3: the Language
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesWilliam Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Kewes and Professor Palfrey offer detailed close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, including Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. You’ll watch critical interp...
Patrick Bixby, "Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy" (Syracuse UP, 2021)
February 18, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesAt the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publish...
Freddy Prestol Castillo, "You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot" (Duke UP, 2019)
February 17, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesIn 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as "The Cutting," and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Duke UP, 2019). Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's n...
Daisy Alpert Florin, "My Last Innocent Year" (Henry Holt, 2023)
February 17, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesToday I talked to Daisy Alpert Florin about her new novel My Last Innocent Year (Henry Holt, 2023). Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy l...
Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017)
February 16, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesRacism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five ...
Justin W. Henry, "Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 16, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesRavana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impressio...
Matthew S. Henry, "Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesThe story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination. In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. He...
Mary C. Flannery, "Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England" (Manchester UP, 2019)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesPracticing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2019) u...
Kathy E. Ferguson, "Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesWhile the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke UP, 2023), Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at p...
Maya Phillips, "Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse" (Atria Books, 2022)
February 14, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesWhen Maya Phillips first saw the opening of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, she knew her life would change forever. She then spent her formative years loving not just the Star Wars saga but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who. In Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022), Phillips, a critic at large for the New York Times, presents an incisive essay collection that explores race, re...
Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesSaga Bougdaeva is the translator of the first English version of Jangar (University of California Press, 2023), the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads. The Kalmyks are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan’s medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by Genghis Khan son’s Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized...
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Part 2: Characters and Questions
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesWilliam Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 turns from the political to the philosophical and psychological, as Simon Palfrey, professor of English at the University of Oxford, analyzes Hamlet’s character, language, and thought. You...
Sara Petrosillo, "Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesFantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol o...
Winston James, "Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik" (Columbia UP, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOne of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of...
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...
James Raven, "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets t...
Jane Hwang Degenhardt, "Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Jane Hwang Degenhardt's book Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford...
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...
Index
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 19 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Dennis Duncan tells us about the history of the index. At it’s simplest, an index is a table with columns that allow you to match sets of terms, most often topics and page numbers. Google is an index, as was the first bible concordance, completed in 1230 under the direction of a French Dominican scholar named Hugo de Saint-Cher. In the episode, Dennis quotes a line from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad: How index-learning turns no student pale. Yet holds the eel of sc...
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Part 1: the Story
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesWilliam Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Paulina Kewes, professor of English at the University of Oxford. Professor Kewes lays out the wide-ranging m...
Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics. Stalin,...
Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, "Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesNote: Sadly, Dr. Marie-Christine Leps passed away before the book came out. Via this conversation, we pay homage to her work that went into the making of this book and to her memories. After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps's book Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Academic Studies Press, 2022) focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through...
Tim Harte, "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)
February 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Tim Harte's Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) looks at sport as artistic subject matter, in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. In sport, artists found inspiration that could be applied both to improvement of the self and to social progress as artists defined it. In the long run, the constraints of the Socialist Realist aesthetic came to constrain the creative freedom of artists, but until t...
Susan Stewart, "The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
February 04, 2023 09:00 - 27 minutesHow have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Ch...
Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesCurtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of t...
Mark A. Schneegurt, "Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews" (2020)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becoming embroiled in the imprisonment, torture, and death in flames that characterized the Inquisition. Without written texts, the Jewish liturgy lost, clans of cryptoJews created a unique body of religious poetry, connecting them to the Laws of Moses, seeking redemption from sin, or hoping for an escape from their embittered lives. The Carvajal cla...
Shakespeare's Life, World and Works 5: How to Read Shakespeare
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesWilliam Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audiences around the globe. Why is that? In this course, you’ll learn who Shakespeare was, what kinds of plays he wrote, and what makes his body of work perhaps the greatest work of art ever created. In Episode Five, Professor Smith shares student-tested strategies for approaching Shakespeare’s plays as a...
Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourVirginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopal Saikumar, who is completing a dissertation on Woolf, Hurston, Baldwin and Gandhi and the “duty to disobey” at NYU, ...
The Mesopotamian Connection: Comparing the Bible to Other Literature of the Ancient Near East
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourProfessor Cathleen Chopra-McGowan examines some the incongruities of our Bible in the context of the Ancient Near East, showing how the stories and traditions of Israel resembled and borrowed from those of Babylon and Assyria. She compares the Genesis narrative to two others, the epics of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis, especially discussing the universal flood narrative and rationale for sacrifice to show the evolution of our ancestors’ religious practice and thinking about God. Professor Chopra-M...
Anthony Reed, "Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production" (Duke UP, 2020)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed...
Kobi Peled, "Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin" (Brill, 2022)
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFor generations, the composition and recitation of poetry has been a key mode of expression among Bedouin populations in the Middle East, reflecting social norms, religious practices, relationships with the natural environment, and tribal histories and politics. In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100...
Eric Adler, "The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today" (Oxford UP, 2020)
January 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThese are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford UP, 2020) demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescu...
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...
Gregory Pfitzer, "'Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas': Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
January 24, 2023 04:00 - 50 minutesIn “Fame is Not Just for the Fellas”: Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), Gregory Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices surrounding the biographies of women in the popular children’s book series Childhood of Famous Americans, published between 1932 and 1958. Using conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill publishers, the book tells the story of ...
Shakespeare's Life, World and Works 4: Shakespeare’s Work
January 23, 2023 09:00 - 9 minutesWilliam Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audiences around the globe. Why is that? In this course, you’ll learn who Shakespeare was, what kinds of plays he wrote, and what makes his body of work perhaps the greatest work of art ever created. Episode Four introduces you to the plays--the kinds of stories that Shakespeare wrote, the way he develope...