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
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Jane Satterfield, "Letter to Emily Brontë," The Common magazine (Spring, 2022)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesJane Satterfield speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Letter to Emily Brontë,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Jane talks about her longstanding interest in the Brontë sisters, and why this pandemic poem is directed to Emily in particular. She also discusses letter-writing as a structure for poetry, and reads another poem published in The Common, “Totem,” which reflects on a childhood memory through more adult understanding. Jane Satterfield’s most recent book i...
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in...
Peter Coviello, "Vineland Reread" (Columbia UP, 2021)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesVineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history. In Vineland Reread (Columbia UP, 2021), Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insu...
Murasaki Yamada, "Talk to My Back" (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesManga historian Ryan Holmberg introduces the influential alternative manga artist Murasaki Yamada (1948-2009) to English readers through a scholarly translation of Talk to My Back (1981-1984), Yamada’s feminist examination of the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams. The manga is paired with an extensive essay by Dr. Holmberg, in which he positions Yamada’s oeuvre within the history of alternative manga and Yamada’s manga within her life. Alternative manga is primarily associated w...
On Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables"
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesOver 150 years later, Les Miserables is a story that still resonates with readers and audiences around the world. The story highlighted the unjust social class system of 19th century France by moving the underrepresented lives of the poor and miserable to center stage. But this wasn’t something unique to France. It was, and still is, a global issue. Victor Hugo knew this story had worldwide relevance and he wanted it to be accessible to all readers. Professor David Bellos is a Professor of Fr...
Peter J. Kalliney, "The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature" (Princeton UP, 2022)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesHow did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022), Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyi...
Neilesh Bose, "India After World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization" (Leiden UP, 2022)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesIn the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Practitioners of these disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner's The Written World, Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch, or ...
On F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutes“America” means something different to everyone. American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, his account of the roaring twenties, the decade of economic growth and social change that followed the devastation of World War I. It’s a text that powerfully describes a country in flux, but it also captures something deeper and more enduring about American culture. David Alworth is a professor at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Associate of the Department of English at Harvard U...
Kathryn Harkup, "Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesWilliam Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions – shock, sadness, fear – that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up? In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence and public executions were a common occurrence, and the chances of seeing a dead or dying body on the...
NBN Classic: Kas Saghafi, "The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics" (SUNY Press, 2020)
September 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In this episode, I interview Kas Saghafi, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, about his book The World After the End of the World, published through SUNY Press in 2020. In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of “the end the world” in Derrida’s late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the dea...
NBN Classic: Ari Linden, "Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
September 25, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition. This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specif...
NBN Classic: Great Books: Manthia Diawara on Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"
September 24, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's 1958 Things Fall Apart transformed the world by vividly imagining the story of an African community in English, the language of the colonizers, and yet on its own terms. It transformed not only the English language but allowed millions of readers to enter into a civilization and worldview that is at once highly specific yet resonant with...
NBN Classic: Great Books: Carol Gilligan on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
September 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter tells the dramatic story of a woman cast out of society for adultery and condemned to wear a badge of shame in Puritan New England. Renowned psychologist Carol Gilligan identifies Hawthorne’s masterpiece as “the American novel” because (as Hawthorne puts it toward the book’s end) it points to a “new truth [that would place]...
Olga Melnyk, "Ship Life: Seven Months of Voluntary Slavery" (2022)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesShip Life: Seven Months of Voluntary Slavery (2022) is written in the form of a diary of a Ukrainian girl who worked as a bar server on an American cruise ship. Day after day, the author recreates from memory the real events of the seven months spent on board, sharing her impressions, discoveries, and experiences. Readers of this diary have the opportunity to visit more than 20 countries in Europe, North and Central America with the author, and most importantly - to learn firsthand what it is...
"Riding the Wild Horse in Chinese Literature”: Translation and Research on "Jin Ping Mei"
September 23, 2022 04:00 - 27 minutesWhat is the oral tradition of Chinese storytelling about and what is the connection to the great Chinese novels? How to translate a Chinese classic such as the famed and defamed “Jin Ping Mei”? And how to handle the dilemma of steering one’s boat between enormous amounts of scholarship on the novel without drowning, and keeping up the tempo of translation day after day? NIAS senior researcher Vibeke Børdahl joined NIAS Press Student Assistant, Julia Heinle, to discuss her upcoming publication...
Olúfemi Táíwò, "Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously" (Hurst, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDecolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez abo...
Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesBoubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his languag...
Mary J. Magoulick, "The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: A Feminist Critique" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesGoddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (including essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scho...
On Jorge Luis Borges' "Fictions"
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesFictions is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the mid-20th century, Latin American literature gained a worldwide audience, in part thanks to Borges. His works popularized the idea that literature coming from Latin America cannot be reduced to tropical fantasies or realist depictions of exotic worlds. Mariano Siskind is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Some of his research interests include ...
Andrew Sean Greer, "Less Is Lost" (Little Brown, 2022)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesAndrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and ...
Andrew Hadfield, "Literature and Class: From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution" (Manchester UP, 2021)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAndrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. Andrew has written widely on topics ranging from class struggle in the Forsyte chronicles, Hamlet and Poland, and early modern political theory. He is the author of an authoritative biography of Edmund Spenser and the co-editor of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology. His new book is Literature and Class: From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution, publishe...
On Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe"
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 33 minutesWhen it was first published in 1719, many people believed Robinson Crusoe was a true story. Crusoe provides readers with a close look at not only the isolated human on an individual level, but also humanity on the international level through its depictions of global trade and economics. Professor Stephanie DeGooyer is the Fredrick Burkhart fellow at UCLA. She is an associate professor of English, and her current project is titled “Acts of Naturalization: Immigration and the Early Novel.” See ...
Abby L. Goode, "Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability" (UNC Press, 2022)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesIn this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though s...
On Giovanni Boccaccio’s "The Decameron"
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 28 minutesFrom roughly 1346 to 1353, Europe was paralyzed by the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history; the bubonic plague. The plague killed more than 60% of the total population in Eurasia. This is the backdrop of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of short novellas completed in 1353. Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of French and Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is author of the books The Dominion of the Dead and Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. See mo...
Courtney Zoffness, "Spilt Milk" (McSweeney's, 2021)
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesCourtney Zoffness is the author of Spilt Milk, out now with McSweeney’s, and forthcoming in paperback in September 2022. Spilt Milk was named a best debut of 2021 by BookPage and Refinery29, and a “must-read” by Good Morning America. Also a fiction writer, Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 38 countries. She joined a list of winners that includes Anthony Doerr and Junot Díaz. Other honors include an ...
89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)
September 15, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesCharles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists si...
On Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions"
September 15, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesJean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society has an enormous influence on human development and behavior. In his later years, he wrote a detailed account of his life to help explain how his own experiences shaped his personality, views, neuroses, and imperfections. This autobiography was called Confessions. Professor David Avrom Bell is a professor of History at Princeton University. He focu...
Sasha Senderovich, "How the Soviet Jew Was Made" (Harvard UP, 2022)
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where...
Vauhini Vara, "The Immortal King Rao" (Norton, 2022)
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesVauhini Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; reviewing it in the Times, Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” It will be followed by a story collection, This is Salvaged, in 2023. She studied creative writing at the Iowa Write...
Michael Ignatieff, "On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesWhen we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeut...
Book Talk 55: Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir ...
Elizabeth Andrews Bond, "The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2021)
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourInspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2021) is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond diligently scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years ...
Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourArt After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others. What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longe...
Barry Houlihan, "Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951-1977" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
September 09, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesDrawing on newly released and digitized archival records, Houlihan’s Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951-1977 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) examines a pivotal period of social and cultural change in the history of Irish theatre, offering unique insights into the production and reception of Irish drama, its internationalization and political influences. From the 1950s onwards, Irish theatre engaged audiences within new theatrical forms at venues from the Pike ...
Jini Kim Watson, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (Fordham UP, 2021)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHow did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form ...
4.1 “Sometimes I’m just a little disappointed in English”
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesA novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfect start to Season 4 of Novel Dialogue. Our first themed season is devoted to translation in all its forms: into and out of English and also in, around, and over the borders between criticism and fiction. We talk to working translators, novelists who write in multiple languages, and we even time travel to discover older novels made new again in t...
Silvia Schwarz Linder, "Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya" (Routledge, 2022)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesSilvia Schwarz Linder's Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurarahasya (Routledge, 2022) is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions ab...
Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura, "Letters from Japan's Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" (IEAS, 2021)
September 07, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesCultural historians Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura partner with one of Japan’s premier experts in calligraphy and letter writing, Takashi Masuda, to translate and annotate twenty-three unique letters alongside images of the hand-brushed originals. Each letter is presented first in its original format as a brushed piece of calligraphy. The authors provide a transcription of the letter into Japanese, followed by an English translation. Next is a commentary with the biography of the letter’s ...
Charo B. D'Etcheverry, "Celebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 06, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesCelebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. Charo B. D'Etcheverry translates a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and va...
Erin James, "Narrative in the Anthropocene" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State UP, 2022), Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current geological epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems? and What can our current geological epoch teach us about narrative? Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,Maria Popova’s collective biography Figuring, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here,Indigeno...
Sarah Thankam Mathews, "All This Could Be Different" (Viking, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesSarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Iowa Writers Workshop. All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022) is her first novel. Sarah’s Recommendations: Halle Butler, The New Me Akil Kumarasamy, Meet Us By the Roaring Sea Dhumketu, The Shehnai Virtuoso Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches Make a don...
Karinne Keithley Syers, "Astrs" (53rd State Press, 2022)
September 02, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesKarinne Keithley Syers is the founding editor of 53rd State Press, and Astrs is the play that inspired that long-running experiment in publishing avant-garde texts for performance. This is a play that takes place in a "53rd state" of rabbit terrorists and Blanquist ennui, where text can be sung, spoken, projected, or read. In this conversation, we discuss the play, studying with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College, and the founding mission of 53rd State Press. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in ...
4.0 Novel Dialogue Season 4: Transitions and Translations
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 11 minutesIntroducing Season 4.0 of Novel Dialogue! Hosts John Plotz and Aarthi Vadde welcome new lead hosts Emily Hyde and Chris Holmes. This will be Novel Dialogue’s first themed season focusing on conversations between translators and novelists. Our hosts offer a sneak peek into a very exciting season. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more ...
On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man"
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesPlay is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In fact, in this collection of letters, Schiller claimed that the only way we could achieve utopia was by making play a central aspect of society. Professor Doris Sommer is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Ag...
On Homer's "The Iliad"
August 30, 2022 08:00 - 25 minutesThe Iliad is among the oldest surviving works of literature, but for a long time The Iliad wasn’t written down. It’s a story that has influenced the world for over three thousand years, but for the ancient Greeks, it was history. One man, Homer, is credited with writing The Iliad, but it’s more likely that The Iliad was composed by many ancient storytellers—a lot of whom were women. Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literatu...
On Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 25 minutesIt makes sense that historian Nathanial Philbrick calls Moby-Dick the “American Bible.” Along with being a story of adventure and danger, it’s also a celebration of pluralism and a critique of social and religious hierarchies. In this episode, Yale professor John Peters takes a deep dive into the many facets of this iconic tale. John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History...
Michael Ackland, "The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami" (Cambria Press, 2022)
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesHaruki Murakami has often been accused of being a feckless, merely popular writer, but in The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami (Cambria Press, 2022) Michael Ackland demonstrates that this is not the case, arguing that Murakami has not only assimilated the existentialist heritage but innovatively changed and revitalized it, thereby placing exciting personal possibilities within the reach of his worldwide readership. Ackland’s study begins by tracing the troubled introduction of such al...
Sarah Neville, "Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesOver the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works of botany underwent a radical change in the English book trade. A genre that was once produced in smaller cheaper formats became lavishly produced, authoritative editions. But as Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2022) shows, the relationships between making, producing, and consuming of botanical and medical knowledge was much more fluid. Today I am discussing this new book with the author Sarah Neville. Sa...
Ruben Espinosa, "Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism" (Routledge, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (Routledge, 2021), Ruben Espinosa explores the works of the early modern dramatist in the context of Trump-era immigration policies, anti-Black police violence, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in American life. Espinosa is Professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of the previous monograph, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England, and the co-editor of the collection Shakespeare and Immigration, both av...
James Welker, "Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourQueer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), edited by James Welker, brings together twenty-one scholars exploring BL media, its fans, and its sociocultural impacts in a dozen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia—and beyond. Contributors draw on their expertise in an array of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, political science, and sociology to shed ligh...