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
Eva Mroczek, “The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity” (Oxford UP, 2016)
December 23, 2016 11:16 - 51 minutesThe discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, Bible and a bibliographic one, book. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2016) suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own litera...
David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, eds. “Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England” (Duquesne UP, 2016)
December 19, 2016 11:19 - 45 minutesCulinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap...
Gail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015/2017)
December 14, 2016 15:02 - 33 minutesDilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Harry Potter’s pageantry, Game of Thrones‘ swordplay, the Renaissance Faire, York’s mystery plays, America’s jousts, and Chaucer translated into a panoply languages: the European medieval endures in the global postmodern. In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury Academic; Hardcover 2...
Scott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters” (Penguin, 2016)
November 28, 2016 21:12 - 38 minutesLike so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-budget film featuring zombie hordes. I also love those rarer literary takes on the undead, such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and I even published my own riff on the genre entitled The Cliffs, which imagines what those familiar zombies might do in the Appalachian foothills where I live. If you sha...
Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, “The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World” (Thames and Hudson, 2016)
November 28, 2016 20:54 - 1 hourOn today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton) in November 2016. The book looks at 45 featured manuscripts from across the globe and through 1,000 years of history, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Queen Mary Psalter, the Canterbury Royal Bible, the Old English Hextateuch, the Welles Apocaly...
Christian Lange, “Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
November 21, 2016 20:11 - 59 minutesChristian Lange’s Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was recently awarded the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society’s Book Prize, presents a rich, challenging, and meticulous account of how Muslims have conceptualized the spiritual world across the centuries. (Lange also edited a related volume with Brill, 2016, Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions.) With great perspicacity, the author explores Sunni and Shi’i views on his topic as well as Sufi under...
Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard” (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
November 19, 2016 19:56 - 1 hourGreetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology, which celebrate, respectively, the formative moments of cultural narratives as opposed to their rupture...
Matthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)
November 15, 2016 11:30 - 1 hourMatthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officially termed Ukrainization–that was introduced in Ukraine during the formative years of the Soviet Union. Out of a massive amount of archival records and documents, Pauly reconstructs a complex and controversial process that happened to have significant consequences for the subsequent decades. In his r...
Mary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton” (McGill-Queens UP, 2016)
November 12, 2016 16:38 - 58 minutesBecoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–produced by Edith Eaton, the writer whose literary status seems to escape the limitations of definitions and categorizations. Sui Sin Far is one of the pseudonyms Eaton invented: this gesture can also be presented as an attempt to escape the limitations of, so to speak, one life. Through compiling Eato...
Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015)
November 12, 2016 16:22 - 1 hourKathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thirty-year period. Organized chronologically as a series of portraits, the book’s chapters deal with the literary (and filmic) output of an impressive number of writers, including Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Soraya Nini, Samira Bell...
Scott Donaldson, “The Impossible Craft” Literary Biography” (Penn State UP, 2015)
November 08, 2016 21:41 - 56 minutesAdmiring books that appeal to our hearts and souls, rather often we want to know more about the writers who create them. If a book is a dialogical and communal entity–as readers we also participate in interpreting what we read, adding to and/or subtracting from the meanings of, so to speak, “original” texts and sharing our ideas with others–a portrait of the writer takes the audience to a somewhat different realm. Who creates writers’ portraits? What sides of writers’ lives get exposed, and w...
Jennifer Glaser, “Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
November 07, 2016 11:10 - 25 minutesIn Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and womens, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction. She offers a nuanced analysis of this practice of Jewish writers speaking for or as other...
Daniel Moran,”Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers” (U. of Georgia Press, 2016)
November 01, 2016 19:55 - 45 minutesDaniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a Southern female writer over the years evolved into her status of great American writer. The subtitle of the book–Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers–hints at a variety of details contributing to a literary multilayered portrait. In his research, Dr. Moran considers a number of critical reviews...
Kate Partridge, “Intended American Dictionary” (Miel Press, 2016)
October 31, 2016 14:39 - 47 minutesWe commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way. “I hear America singing” he famously wrote in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. What’s less commonly know is that Whitman had a very clear idea as to how a poet should create this song. In his preface to the very first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book he ...
Kristen Case, “Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self” (Essay Press, 2015)
October 08, 2016 16:47 - 46 minutesEmily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on alm...
Kristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family” (Stanford UP, 2016)
October 05, 2016 22:24 - 1 hourKristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period. He wrote three popular novels Family, Spring, and Autumn, collectively known as the Turbulent Stream trilogy set in the reformist 1920s and in his hometown of Chengdu. Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family (Stanford University Press, 2016) focuses on one of t...
Alisa Solomon, “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof” (Metropolitan, 2013)
October 03, 2016 10:05 - 45 minutesIn Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan, 2013), Alisa Solomon, Director of the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, traces how and why the story of Tevye the milkman, the creation of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a cultural touchstone. She examines the pre-history of the first adaptations, the core story of the development of the bro...
Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012)
September 29, 2016 18:37 - 48 minutesIn The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark Andryczyk’s research offers an insightful analysis of Ukrainian literature that was taking shape right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the...
Jan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust” (Wayne State UP, 2015)
September 26, 2016 10:03 - 40 minutesIn Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers a...
Ellen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China” (Harvard UP, 2016)
September 21, 2016 19:53 - 1 hourEllen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) looks carefully at the work of Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, brothers and late-Qing writers of fiction and other forms. Widmer cont...
E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
September 21, 2016 18:51 - 54 minutes“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their...
Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
September 12, 2016 10:00 - 23 minutesIn The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers. She examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with topics such as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences. By bringing an i...
Robert K. Elder, et. al. “Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park” (Kent State UP, 2016)
August 29, 2016 18:29 - 59 minutesBefore the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K. Elder lives in Oak Park, and for the colorful and interesting Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (Kent State University Press, 2016), he and his co-authors Aaron Vetch and Mark Cirino dug into multiple locations of the Hemi...
Robert O’Kell, “Disraeli: The Romance of Politics” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)
August 11, 2016 21:40 - 1 hourBenjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’s literary endeavors as an aberration born of financial necessity, in his book Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Robert O’Kell presents the novels as key to understanding his inner life and how he conceptualized his political career. Beginning with his participat...
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015)
July 25, 2016 17:12 - 1 hourMark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) explores the entanglement of literature, religion, and community in China. Thunder rituals were used t...
Josh Lambert, “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture” (NYU Press, 2014)
July 18, 2016 10:00 - 33 minutesIn Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst, explores the role of Jews in the history of obscenity in America. Through a series of case studies, he shows how Jews battled censorship as writers, editors, publishers, critics, and lawyers. In their engagements in battles over obscenity, Jews have played a previously underappreciated...
Aisha Geissinger, “Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015)
July 12, 2016 21:57 - 52 minutesAisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance an...
Jessa Crispin, “The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)
July 01, 2016 17:12 - 34 minutesBiography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats & Ex-Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2015), “The important tas...
Sarah Wald, “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl” (U. of Washington Press, 2016)
June 28, 2016 19:16 - 58 minutesThe California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in wha...
Susan Kavaler-Adler, “The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers” (ORI Academic, 2013)
June 27, 2016 20:28 - 57 minutesDr. Susan Kavaler-Adler a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice and founder of The Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she is a training analyst, is a prolific writer and thinker celebrated for integrationist approach to Object Relations thinking. The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and their Demon Lovers, originally published by Routledge in 1993 and recently re-published by ORI Academic Press in 2013, is Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s first o...
Ana Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014)
June 19, 2016 13:26 - 1 hourStarting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Fotev...
Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Laughs’: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour” (Brill, 2015)
June 08, 2016 14:45 - 1 hourThe Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour (Brill, 2015) makes the collection available for English-language readers in a volume that contributes to how we understand both ea...
Mingwei Song, “Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016)
June 03, 2016 15:56 - 1 hourWhat does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive construction of youth’s symbolic meanings and to explore how these meanings underlie the novelistic narrative of modern Chinese youths’ personal development. Song situates the ...
Roy Fox, “Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image” (Parlor, 2015)
May 17, 2016 11:14 - 48 minutesAll of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of...
Dana Sajdi, “The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant” (Stanford UP, 2012)
May 16, 2016 14:31 - 52 minutesIn her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century Damascus Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr. Through a close reading of the intellectual and politic...
Maria C. Fumagalli, “On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic” (Liverpool UP, 2015)
May 12, 2016 13:48 - 35 minutesThe border that divides the island of Hispaniola has been the site of commercial and cultural exchanges, labor migrations, environmental change, and violence. Maria Cristina Fumagalli‘s wonderful, wide-ranging On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Liverpool Press, 2015) offers glimpses of the numerous literary texts, art works and films that try, in some way or another, to come to terms with what the border is and how it shapes the lives of both Haitians an...
Ayesha Ramachandran, “Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
May 11, 2016 00:00 - 56 minutesAt what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and n...
Emily Troscianko, “Kafka’s Cognitive Realism” (Routledge, 2014)
May 02, 2016 10:46 - 39 minutesIn her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko ...
Seth Jacobowitz, “Writing Technology in Meiji Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015)
April 26, 2016 12:36 - 1 hourSeth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part, by the work of Friedrich Kittler, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) traces the story of shorthand in Japan. First introduced for recording political speeches and the condu...
Stern, et al., “The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee” (Penn State UP, 2015)
April 20, 2016 15:02 - 1 hourThe Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collabo...
Kate Bolick, “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own” (Crown, 2015)
April 19, 2016 11:57 - 40 minutes“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about to change. Bolick burst onto the national scene when her article in The Atlantic, entitled “All t...
Marlene Daut, “Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865” (Liverpool UP, 2015)
April 18, 2016 17:36 - 51 minutesMarlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She not only describes the immediate political reaction to the Haitian Revolution, but traces how writers, novelists, playwrights, and scholars imposed particular racial assumptions onto that event for decades afterward. Specifically, she identifies a number of...
Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination” (Columbia UP, 2016)
April 18, 2016 17:19 - 30 minutesIn Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Phillips Casteel, associate professor of English at Carleton University, explores the representation of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. She investigates the meaning of two episodes of trauma in Jewish history, the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust, for Caribbean and diaspora writers. Her focus on this under-explored Caribbean story serves as an alternative to the traditional U.S.-base...
Minsoo Kang, trans. “The Story of Hong Gildong” (Penguin Classics, 2016)
April 01, 2016 10:54 - 1 hourMinsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classic…prose fiction of Korea.” Though Hong Gildong is a popular figure in modern Korean culture – a kind of Robin Hood character, “Hong Gildong” is also used as a generic name on instruction forms, in the manner of “John Doe” – the story that made him famous has not been widely read and enjoyed for English-language audie...
Sulak and Kolosov, eds., “Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres” (Rose Metal Press, 2015)
March 30, 2016 09:41 - 30 minutesWhen Marcela Sulak was planning classes in the MFA program she directs at Bar Ilan University, it became clear that the traditional prose/poetry binary was not going to work. In both her own and her students’ writing, there was a tendency to complicate the binary, to produce literary writing that hybridized many established forms and genres. And so there was a real, practical need for a text to instruct from that would define literary hybridity, and model new hybrid forms. And there wasn’t on...
Tahneer Oksman, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 24, 2016 11:34 - 29 minutesIn “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), Tahneer Oksman explores the graphic memoirs of seven female cartoonists, whose works grapple with issues of Jewish identity – from confronting stereotypes of Jewish women’s bodies and behaviors, to ambivalence over what it means to be a progressive Jew on a Birthright trip to Israel. Through visual and textual analysis, Oksman illustrates how her a...
Eubanks, Abel and Chen, eds., “Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.2: Collecting Asias” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015)
March 18, 2016 18:13 - 1 hourVerge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel, and Tina Chen about Volume 1, Issue 2: Collecting Asias (Fall 2015), which includes – among several fascinating essays – a portfolio of Akamatsu Toshiko’s sketches of Micronesia, an interview about Mughal collections, an introduction to three wonderful digital projec...
Jean-Michel Rabate, “The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
March 18, 2016 17:45 - 58 minutesCalling into question common assumptions regarding the supposedly antagonist relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalytic reading, Jean-Michel Rabatepaints a picture of reconciliation rather than rift. Drawing from a vast store of cultural incident–from Sophie Calle’s modern art to the novels of Henry James–The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014) argues that psychoanalysis and active literary reading are both implicated in t...
Hillary Chute, “Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form” (Harvard UP, 2016)
March 14, 2016 14:48 - 53 minutesIn her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is ...
Friederike Kind-Kovacs, “Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain” (Central European UP, 2014)
March 07, 2016 14:10 - 1 hourWritten Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed description of the social practices, debates and discourses that were part of a transnational literary community created by tamizdat – literary works written in communist Europe but published in the West. Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Southeastern and Eastern Europe, University of Regensburg, demonstrate...