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
Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012)
September 07, 2017 10:00 - 51 minutesMykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape writers’ reputations. Born and educated in Ukraine, Vynnycheko had to leave his homeland shortly after the emergence of the Soviet Union: his political vision ...
Omar Valerio-Jimenez and Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, eds. “The Latina/o Midwest Reader” (U. Illinois Press, 2017)
September 05, 2017 22:19 - 49 minutesIn The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017) editors Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, and Claire F. Fox bring together an exceptional cadre of scholars to dispel the notion that Latinas/os are newcomers to the Midwest. Through seventeen penetrating essays, this collection explores the trajectory of Latina/o migration, their demographic transformation of the Midwest, importance as laborers, neighbors, and community builders, as well as their struggles to o...
Hanna Tervanotko, “Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature” (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016)
August 29, 2017 15:03 - 40 minutesIn Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature (Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 2016) Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary character in ancient Jewish texts, taking into account all the references to this figure preserved in ancient Jewish literature from the exilic period to the early second century C.E.: Exodus 15:20-21; Deuteronomy 24:8-9; Numbers 12:1-15; 20:1; 26:59; 1 Chronicles 5:29; Micah 6:4, the Septuagint, the Dead ...
Rahuldeep Singh Gill, “Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla” (Oxford UP, 2016)
August 27, 2017 10:00 - 48 minutesThere is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, addresses this lacuna in Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (Oxford University Press, 2017). Through a detailed analysis and lucid translation of the literary tradition of Bhai Gurdas B...
Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016)
August 25, 2017 15:36 - 57 minutesAs I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s about a doctor who takes animals and tries to make them human by surgically alerting them. I don’t remember much about the movie–I think Burt Lancaster played Moreau–b...
Karmen MacKendrick, “The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings” (Fordham UP, 2016)
August 19, 2017 14:40 - 49 minutesPhilosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. Voices also give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstraction, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all word...
Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016)
August 14, 2017 10:00 - 32 minutesMichael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the differences between different types of literature. He uses colonial Egypt as a geographic focus of inquiry and demonstrates how literary traditions changed the act of reading: his examples include the Rosetta Stone and translations of the Qur’an. ...
Jacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017)
July 25, 2017 15:58 - 48 minutesIn Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused and initiated by the programs aimed at the redefinition of economy and society. The spheres of family and economy ...
Patrick S. Tomlinson, “Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth, Book Two” (Angry Robot, 2016)
July 24, 2017 01:29 - 41 minutesPatrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth (Book One) and Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth (Book Two), which follow the last humans eleven generations removed from Earth as their 10-mile-long spaceship arrives on a new planet. As befits a man who wears many hats, Tomlinson’s books are not easily categorized, m...
Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017)
July 20, 2017 21:51 - 57 minutesIn his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges as o...
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, “Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt” (UWA Publishing, 2017)
July 09, 2017 10:00 - 19 minutesIn his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, explores the work of 11 writers who lived in the wheatbelt of southwestern Australia. Delving into the creative writing of authors like Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Jack Davis, he helps us understand the human effects of this massive-scal...
Allan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
July 08, 2017 18:36 - 54 minutesIn Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivating stories. In his meticulously conducted research, Allan Pasco argues that Honor de Balzac was not only a storyteller: he was “a sociologist avant l’heure” (113) and “a competent historian” (234). Balzac, Literary Sociologist offers a detailed analysis of more than ten literary pieces. While emph...
Lyn McCredden, “The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred” (Sydney UP, 2017)
June 25, 2017 10:00 - 19 minutesIn her book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes in the writings of Western Australian author Tim Winton. By tracing ideas of class, gender, place, landscape, and belonging in Winton’s numerous works, she demonstrates how his writing eludes easy classification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by bec...
Michelle D. Commander, “Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic” (Duke UP, 2017)
June 20, 2017 22:50 - 1 hourIn Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence betwee...
Gary Kulik, “War Stories: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers” (Potomac Books, 2009)
June 15, 2017 12:08 - 1 hourOne often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know what had happened nor did they want to relive it themselves. It was just too horrible to relate. The truth about combat in those conflicts, so we are told, was therefore suppressed. In Vietnam, the truth was also suppressed, but in a different way and for altogether different reasons. As Gary Kulik ...
Michael Muhammad Knight, “Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing” (Soft Skull Press, 2013)
June 13, 2017 20:37 - 1 hourMichael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as...
Susan Rubenstein DeMasi, “Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project” (McFarland, 2016)
June 01, 2017 19:43 - 55 minutesOver the course of a long and adventurous life, Henry Alsberg was guided by the constancy of his passion for radical causes. This focus, as Susan Rubenstein DeMasi makes clear in Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland, 2016) defined both his varied career choices and his greatest achievements. Alsbeg’s radicalism was a constant of his life from an early age, and led him to abandon his initial employment as a lawyer for more fulfilling work as ...
Augustine’s “Confessions,” a new translation by Sarah Ruden (Modern Library, 2017)
June 01, 2017 19:33 - 1 hourSarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the...
Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017)
May 26, 2017 18:20 - 45 minutesTraversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of...
Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra, eds. “The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside” (U. Chicago, 2017)
May 26, 2017 17:44 - 50 minutes“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath them” (1). Over the past half-century boxing has endured a strange fate: a fall from cultural dominance simultaneous to a rise in payouts so enormous that top fighters are the most valuable athletes on the planet. A puzzle like this attracts th...
Sarah Ruden, “The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible” (Pantheon, 2017)
May 17, 2017 20:51 - 1 hourOn this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden ho...
Roy Bing Chan, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature” (U. Washington Press, 2017)
May 04, 2017 18:56 - 1 hourRoy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, affect studies, and more, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (University of Washington Press, 2017) cons...
Territory-A Literary Project about Maps: Discussion with Tommy Mira y Lopez
May 03, 2017 10:00 - 54 minutesAs our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds...
William Kolbrener, “The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition” (Indiana UP, 2016)
April 24, 2017 10:00 - 33 minutesIn The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016), William Kolbrener, professor of English at Bar Ilan University in Israel, explores the life and thought of Joseph Soloveitchik, the scion of the Brisk rabbinic dynasty, from both literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. The result is both a compelling critique of extant receptions of Soloveitchik’s thought and a nuanced exploration of the sources and struggles at the root of the Rav’s towering int...
Allison E. Fagan, “From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
April 24, 2017 10:00 - 42 minutesWhat is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for consideration; furthermore, a printed item itself shapes the environment, revealing and producing further de...
Rebecca Gould, “Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus” (Yale UP, 2016)
April 22, 2017 20:22 - 1 hourRebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and a major contribution to the study of the cultures of the Caucasus. The book examines literary representations of anticolonial violence in the Caucasus across more than a century-long period of time. The monographs central focus is on the figure of abrek (bandit), prominent across all three national...
Benjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday” (NYRB Classics, 2016)
April 07, 2017 10:20 - 1 hourBenjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible. Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, ...
Audrey Truschke, “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” (Columbia UP, 2016)
April 03, 2017 10:00 - 51 minutesContemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speakin...
Steve Aldous, “The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series” (McFarland, 2015)
March 29, 2017 10:00 - 44 minutesWho’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) Ya damn right Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? (Shaft) Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? (Shaft) Right on They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother – (Shut your mouth) But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft – (Then we can dig it) He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman (John Shaft) –Theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes Ment...
Carrie J. Preston, “Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching” (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 29, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourCarrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry, modern dance, film, and popular entertainment. Inspired by noh’s practice of retelling stories in different styles and tenses, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) also weaves together a number of writing styles, and incorporates Preston’s o...
Joseph Lumbard, “The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary” (HarperOne, 2015)
March 24, 2017 11:45 - 56 minutesThe Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, Caner Dagli, and Mohammad Rustom). The book is a remarkable achievement. The text features a complete new translation of the Quran as well as multiple complementary essays written by leading scholars of Quranic studies. The tome also includes over a million words of running commentary from Muslim exe...
Stephen H. Grant, “Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
March 21, 2017 13:43 - 54 minutesHenry and Emily Folger were linked together not just by their love for one another, but their shared passion for the works of William Shakespeare. In Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Stephen H. Grant describes how the two of them devoted their lives to acquiring Shakespeare’s works and related artifacts and how that collection became the cornerstone of one of the great cultural institutions in the world today. Though his inter...
Laurence A. Rickels, “The Psycho Records” (Wallflower Press, 2016)
March 21, 2017 12:45 - 54 minutesReading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels...
Sarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 20, 2017 10:00 - 33 minutesIn Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explores the admiring and at times oppositional philosophical kinship between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the France’s greatest 20th century philosophers. One fundamental aspect of the Levinas-Derrida relationship is each man’s relationship to his Jewish i...
Christopher Pizzino, “Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature” (U of Texas Press, 2016)
March 19, 2017 14:09 - 32 minutesThere’s a common myth about the history of comic books and strips. It’s the idea that the medium languished for decades as a sort of time-wasting hobby for children, but now has redeemed itself and can be appreciated even by the literary. University of Georgia professor and comics scholar Christopher Pizzino argues that this history is as false as Clark Kent’s eyeglass prescription. Comics, he says, are still burdened by their early stigma, their status in modern culture tenuous at best. In ...
Gleb Tsipursky, “Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
March 14, 2017 19:21 - 56 minutesSocialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were popular in the Soviet Union, Tsipursky contributes to the discussion concerning the shaping of Soviet mentality and co...
Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
March 13, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourMeredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born wri...
Glyne Griffith, “The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
March 07, 2017 11:00 - 50 minutesThe BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne Griffith’s The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) is one of a few detailed studies of this program and the people and institutions that made it possible. Griffith makes important arguments about the combined force of letters, texts and b...
Andre Carrington, “Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016)
March 03, 2017 11:00 - 1 hourHave you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultur...
Benjamin Schreier, “The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History” (NYU Press, 2015)
February 27, 2017 11:05 - 46 minutesWhat is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects. This is one of the central concerns for Benjamin Schreier, Associate Professor at Penn State University, in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015). He calls for a critical study of identity and identification ...
Maria G. Rewakowicz, “Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets” (Academic Studies Press, 2014)
February 23, 2017 20:06 - 1 hourIn Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which, in spite of the geographical limitations implied by its name, appeared to invite artists from a variety of geographical loci and aesthetic backgrounds. Literat...
David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood” (Yale UP, 2013)
February 09, 2017 17:38 - 1 hour“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveilla...
Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)
February 04, 2017 22:09 - 1 hourRandy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how sc...
Stephen Brockmann, “The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959” (Camden House, 2015)
January 27, 2017 19:51 - 52 minutesStephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that accompanied the emergence of East German literature from 1945-1959. Covering almost fifteen years, the research presents insightful observations of the literary process that happened to be intricately connected with the political turbulence. As Stephen Brockmann puts it, literature in East Germany was ...
Richard Jean So, “Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network” (Columbia University Press, 2016)
January 23, 2017 23:01 - 1 hourRichard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a number of reasons, including a transformation in US-China relations, transformations in the world economy and international politics, the rise of a new era in media technologies (including the...
David Willgren, “The Formation of the ‘Book’ of Psalms” (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)
January 20, 2017 21:12 - 48 minutesHow was the ‘Book’ of Psalms formed, and why? The first question relates to the diachronic growth of the collection, while the second relates to issues of purpose–to what end are psalms being juxtaposed in a collection? On this show, David Willgren explains his surprising answers to these two fundamental questions as we talk about his recent book, The Formation of the ‘Book ‘of Psalms (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). By conceptualizing the ‘Book’ of Psalms as an anthology, and by inquiring into its poe...
Sara L. Crosby, “Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America” (U. Iowa Press, 2016)
January 20, 2017 19:32 - 1 hourIn this episode of the H-Law Legal History Podcast I talk with Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion, Sara L. Crosby about her new book, Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Crosby discusses how the trope of the female poisoner permeated popular literature in the mid-nineteenth century. In her analysis of the 1840 murder trial of Hannah Kinney, we see how the partisan p...
Melissa Sweet, “Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016
January 06, 2017 22:26 - 47 minutesReaders of all ages know E. B. White’s work. Charlotte’s Web is the first book many children are read aloud. Elements of Style remains an essential reference book. Almost everyone has a favorite writing by White: his legendary essays; his humorous New Yorker captions and columns; his short stories about New York City; Stuart Little; The Trumpet of the Swan. Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is the first illustrated biography of this great American literary...
David Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016)
January 04, 2017 02:11 - 1 hour“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of this enigmatic and fascinating figure in historical context. From his bourgeois family background, through a life that included a variety of physical and mental health challenges, drug use, and institutionalization, Shafer traces the ways that Artaud’s intellectual and artistic development was shaped ...
Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013)
January 04, 2017 02:08 - 1 hourIn The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World War II Lithuania, Davoliute demonstrates how cultural elites wove together nationalist and communist ideologies to shape the emerging Soviet Lithuan...