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
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...
Yael Halevi-Wise, "The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua" (Penn State UP, 2020)
August 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourOnce referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel's leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua's artistic gr...
On Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"
August 24, 2022 08:00 - 33 minutesFrankenstein is a name we all know, even for those who haven’t read Mary Shelley’s novel. But the monster you might imagine is quite different from the one Shelley wrote about in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In fact, Shelley’s writing has much more to say about ethics, philosophy, and modern scientific advancement than many ghost story enthusiasts would guess. In this episode, Professor Deidre Lynch discusses the wisdom and warnings found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Deidre Lyn...
On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"
August 23, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesBorn into an aristocratic family, Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s life was forever changed when he served as an officer in the Crimean War. The brutality he witnessed during the war transformed him from a privileged, aristocratic author to a non-violent anarchist. War and Peace explores the brutal reality of what happens when we make war more humane. Tolstoy’s work has inspired nonviolent pacifist movements across the globe and influenced leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr....
Gene Andrew Jarrett, "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird" (Princeton UP, 2022)
August 22, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings. In Paul Laurence Dunba...
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
August 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAs the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of soc...
Roanne Kantor, "South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesEver since T. B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these reg...
On T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"
August 17, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesLawrence of Arabia has become one of the most well known films in the world. It inspired Steven Spielberg to become a filmmaker and President Barack Obama considers it one of his favorite films. But few people know the book behind the movie. In this episode, host Zachary Davis speaks with Professor Charles Stang about Seven Pillars of Wisdom; the autobiographical account of British soldier T. E. Lawrence while he fought alongside rebel forces during the Arab Revolt in WWI. Charles Stang is Pr...
On W. E. B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk"
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesNearly 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, American writer, sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois shed light on Black life in America and what it meant to be seen through a White gaze. In his 1905 text The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois explores the rich and complex African American world and how it helped shape the broader American culture. James Campbell is Professor of US History at Stanford University. He is the author of Slavery and the University - Hist...
Jeremy Black, "The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
August 15, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesFans of Sherlock Holmes will delight to investigate Victorian England, a world where crimes large and small abound and where dark corners and well-lit drawing rooms alike hide villainy. In The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Jeremy Black traces how Holmes and his milieu evolved in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books and how Holmes continues to resonate today. Black explores the context of Doyle's ideas and stories and why they struck such a chord...
On Sholem Aleichem’s "The Tevye Stories"
August 12, 2022 08:00 - 25 minutesThe original production of Fiddler on the Roof won nine Tony awards, held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical, and was adapted into a hit movie. But the musical itself was an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye Stories. Aleichem aimed to create a high literature for Yiddish-speaking readers, but his influence spread much further, to a new country, a new language, and a new medium. Harvard Professor Saul Noam Zaritt discusses the stories behind the musical. Saul Noam Zaritt i...
Simone White, "Or, on Being the Other Woman" (Duke UP, 2022)
August 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn or, on being the other woman (Duke UP, 2022), Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punish...
On Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesZora Neale Hurston was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but her novels didn’t conform to the style of her contemporaries. As a result, her work was almost lost—until the writer Alice Walker found her unmarked grave in 1974. Now, Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is on high school reading lists across the US. Dartmouth professor and poet Joshua Bennett discusses the novel’s longstanding impact and what it can teach us about cancel culture. Joshua Bennett is an Assistan...
Julia May Jonas, "Vladimir: A Novel" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesJulia May Jonas is a writer, director, and the founder of theater company Nellie Tinder. She has taught at Skidmore College and NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir (Simon & Schuster, 2022) is her first novel. Books Recommended in this Episode: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In the Dark Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall Elisa Albert, Human Blues Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca Colle...
Alice M. Kelly, "Decolonising the Conrad Canon" (Liverpool UP, 2022)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesWith the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon (Liverpool UP, 2022) shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad's lesser-known works - breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels -...
Jason Stacy, "Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourA literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town (U Illinois Press, 2021) won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American...
Mohsin Hamid, "The Last White Man" (Riverhead, 2022)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesMohsin Hamid is the author of five novels -- The Last White Man, Exit West, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Moth Smoke -- and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been translated into forty languages, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California. Mohsin Recommends: Michael Ondaatje, The English Pat...
Heide Hinrichs and Jo-Ey Tang, "Shelf Documents: Art Library as Practice" (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, 2021)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesHow can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In Shelf Documents: Art Library as Practice (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, 2021), artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action. In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion. shelf docume...
On Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutes“These United States are themselves the greatest poem.” When Walt Whitman wrote this line, he was an unknown Brooklyn newspaper man. But his work would transform American poetry and offer a new vision of American identity—one that was diverse, urban, and embodied. In this episode, Harvard professor Elisa New discusses Walt Whitman’s legacy. Elisa New is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. She is the creator and host of the TV show Poetry in America, and...
Christopher Krentz, "Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature" (Temple UP, 2022)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 22 minutesDr. Christopher Krentz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where he has a joint appointment with the departments of English and American Sign Language. He is also the author of Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and editor of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816–1864, as well as numerous articles about disability in literature and culture. He is currently director of the University of Virginia’s Disability ...
On "The Story of the Stone"
August 04, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesThe 1750s are remembered as a high point of China's Qing Dynasty: a time of power, prestige, and social harmony. But The Story of the Stone paints a different picture: one of harmful traditions, political corruption, and inter-generational conflict. Over 250 years later, it's one of the most loved novels in Chinese literature, with dozens of adaptations and an entire field of scholarship dedicated to it. In this episode, Stanford professor Ronald Egan discusses the revolutionary story and its...
On Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich"
August 03, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesThere is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his community, he accused his Jewish neighbors of the heinous crime. Over the course of two decades, he wrote a seven-volume conspiracy theory, building out the accusation and cementing it in history. Stanford professor Rowan Dorin discusses the book’s creation and its challenging legacy. Rowan Dorin i...
Book Talk 54: Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"
August 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHalfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It’s easy to write off his message that communication is vital for human existence. He’s a shell-shocked World War I vet, who, in this moment, hallucinates that the birds are communicating with him in grief. But in her landmark 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf understands his traumatized psyche with deep generosity and compassion. Indeed, the book’s pe...
Philip Tsang, "The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
August 03, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesModernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community.The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aest...
Emily O. Wittman, "Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing" (Amherst College Press, 2022)
August 03, 2022 07:00 - 1 hourHow people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and "authentic" experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing (Amherst College Press, 2022), Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked o...
On Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days"
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesWhen French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futurist novel inspired everyday adventurers to traverse the globe by boat, train, bike, and foot—and beat his protagonist’s record. Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin discusses what we can learn from Jules Verne’s classic novel. Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History...
Joshua A. Fogel and Matthew Fraleigh, "Sino-Japanese Reflections: Literary and Cultural Interactions between China and Japan in Early Modernity" (de Gruyter, 2022)
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesJoshua A. Fogel and Matthew Fraleigh's edited volume Sino-Japanese Reflections: Literary and Cultural Interactions between China and Japan in Early Modernity (de Gruyter, 2022) offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and cultur...
Timothy Bewes, "Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age" (Columbia UP, 2022)
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesWhat is the purpose of a novel? What purpose or logic do literary critics assign to a novel? How has the novel changed? What does that mean for its readers and literary criticism in the contemporary era? What does novel share with cinema and what does that mean for contemporary thought? Timothy Bewes provides brilliant insights on these questions in his book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia UP, 2022). Everywhere today, we are urged to “connect.” Literary critics cele...
Wendy Doniger, "After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesWendy Doniger's After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata (Oxford UP, 2022) is a new translation of the final part of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit Epic poem about a devastating fraternal war. In this aftermath of the great war, the surviving heroes find various deaths, ranging from a drunken debacle in which they kill many of their own comrades to suicide through meditation and, finally, magical transportation to both heaven and hell. Bereaved mothers and widows on earth are com...
Kimberly Anne Coles, "Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
July 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourKimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; her first book, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, we are discussing Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. In Bad Humo...
On the Wanderer's Havamal and the Poetic Edda
July 28, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesDr. Jackson W. Crawford is Instructor of Nordic Studies and Coordinator of the Nordic Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Crawford is the author and translator of The Wanderer’s Havamal and The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Both books are available from Hackett Publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
F. Brett Cox, "Roger Zelazny" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
July 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRoger Zelazny (1937-1995) combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. In Roger Zelazny (University of Illinois Press, 2021), F. Brett Cox surveys the landscape of Zelazny's creative life and contradictions. Launched by the classic 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," Zelazny soon won the Hugo Award for Be...
Alice Elliott Dark, "Fellowship Point: A Novel" (Simon and Schuster, 2022)
July 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAlice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Centur...
Elliott Rabin, "The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
July 22, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesToday I talked to Elliott Rabin about his book The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility (Jewish Publication Society, 2020). Approaching the Bible in an original way—comparing biblical heroes to heroes in world literature—Rabin addresses a core biblical question: What is the Bible telling us about what it means to be a hero? Focusing on the lives of six major biblical characters—Moses, Samson, David, Esther, Abraham, and Jacob—Rabin examines their resemblance to hero types foun...
Prison Notebooks: Thinking (and Writing) about Incarceration
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourI can point you to mountains of research about prisons. I can also recommend at least a dozen Netflix documentaries, and highlight a handful of radical activists and scholars. There’s a lot of intellectual work done about prison. But what about intellectual work done in prison? As part of this week’s “ideas in strange places” theme, we want to play you this episode from right near when we started Darts and Letters, where we ask what kind of radical thought can come from the extreme oppression...
85* Pu Wang and John Plotz look back on their Cixin Liu interview
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesOur first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work. They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compa...
World Literature
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 15 minutesRoanne Kantor tells us about World Literature, in the ideas and practices of readers, writers, and scholars. Spatial metaphors like libraries, closets, and airport bookshops, help her imagine the “world” in world literature. In the episode Roanne references work by many scholars in the field, including David Damrosch’s What is World Literature (Princeton UP, 2003); Debjani Ganguly’s This Thing Called the World (Duke UP, 2016), and Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (Co...
The Kushnameh: The Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesThe Kushnameh is unique, literally. Only one copy of the “Epic of Kush”exists, sitting in the British Library. Hardly anything is known about its author, Iranshah. It features a quite villainous protagonist, the tusked warrior Kush, who carves a swathe of destruction across the region. And it spans nearly half the world, with episodes in Spain, the Maghreb, India, China and even Korea. It was that last reference that encouraged academics in Korea to study the Kushnameh, and bring Kaveh Hemmat...
Volodymyr Rafeyenko, "Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022)
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesToday I talked to Mark Andryczyk, translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022). A mondegreen is something that is heard improperly by someone who then clings to that misinterpretation as fact. Fittingly, Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love explores the ways that memory and language construct our identity, and how we hold on to it no matter what. The novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukrain...
Darts and Lasers: The Future of Science Fiction, Afro-Futurism, and Feminist Speculative Fiction
July 20, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIt’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought. We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before. This episode is a rebroadcast f...
Epic
July 20, 2022 08:00 - 16 minutesSohini Sarah Pillai talks about epics, long narrative poems about heroic events – whether all such poems can be called epics, and how they continue to generate cultural and political material. The conversation covers epic poems ranging from the Iliad to Jack Mitchell’s The Odyssey of Star Wars. Sohini Pillai is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College where she teaches courses on religious traditions in South Asia. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious literature and her ...
Xine Yao, "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America" (Duke UP, 2021)
July 19, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesWhat is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability.” In short, Xine argues in a new book from Duke University Press, titled Disaffected: The Cultural Politics ...
Caryn Rose, "Why Patti Smith Matters" (U of Texas Press, 2022)
July 19, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesPatti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. What she found—what she fostered—was a cultural revolution. Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic vocal power, and her very presence as a woman fronting a rock band, she kicked open a door that countless others walked through. No other musician has better embodied the “nothing-to-hide” rawness of punk, nor has any other done more to nurture a place in society for misfits of every st...
Joy Wiltenburg, "Laughing Histories: From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit" (Routledge, 2022)
July 18, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesJoy Wiltenburg's book Laughing Histories: From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit (Routledge, 2022) breaks new ground by exploring moments of laughter in early modern Europe, showing how laughter was inflected by gender and social power. "I dearly love a laugh," declared Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her wit won the heart of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy. Yet the widely read Earl of Chesterfield asserted that only "the mob" would laugh out loud; the gentleman should merely smi...
Patrick Hastings, "The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
July 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrom the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) weaves together plot summaries, interpretive analyses, scholarly perspectives, and historical and biographical context to create an easy-to-read, entertaining, and thorough review of Ulysses. In The Guide to James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Patrick Hastings provides comprehensive support to readers of Joyce's magnum opus by illuminating crucial details and reveling in the mischievous genius of this unpar...
Pigeon Shit Bookstore: On Street Bookselling, Populism, and Public Intellectuals
July 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHi! This is Darts and Letters. We’ve just become a part of New Books Network, so we want to introduce ourselves. Fundamentally, This is a show about the politics of ideas. Another way to say that would be “intellectuals”, but we don’t really gel with this classic idea of intellectuals being white guys at Harvard. We’re more populist than that, and we have a whole segment in this episode about what we really mean by populism. This is our first episode, and we made it in 2020 in the run up to B...
Donovan Sherman, "The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
July 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato says, “I pray thee peace; I will be flesh and blood. / For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods / And make a push at chance and sufferance.” These lines serve as the inspiration for the title of a new book from today’s guest, Donovan Sherman. The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama, was published by Northwestern Univers...
Disintermediation
July 14, 2022 20:00 - 15 minutesMark McGurl talks about disintermediation, a key term for internet commerce, and his new book about fiction in the age of digital self-publication. The fantasy of disintermediation lies at the heart of utopian dreams of the internet, but it turns out that not only is the internet actually a medium, and a vast economic engine, but self-publishing is a lot of work! Mark McGurl is a professor of English at Stanford University. If you want to learn more about the effects of Amazon’s self-publishi...
Flatness
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 18 minutesNoreen Masud talks about the unnamed feelings and ambiguous modes of relationship occasioned by flat landscapes, and the act of looking at them, in twentieth century fiction, especially the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein. Noreen Masud is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, currently working on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature. Her first academic book, Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, is out with OUP in 2022, and her first trade b...
Autofictionalization
July 12, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutesClaus Elholm Andersen talks about autofictionalization, a mode of narration that characterizes autotfiction, where the narrative consciousness or voice is placed with the experiencing character and not the narrator. Of particular interest here are texts produced after the financial crisis of 2008 which exemplify this mode, most importantly Karl Ove Knausgård’s series My Struggle (2009-2011). Claus Elholm Andersen is the Paul and Renate Madsen Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the...