New Books in Literary Studies

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Duranti explores the relevance of intentions in making sense of what others say reflecting the range of his intellectual curiosity: from analytic and continental philosophical foundations of the concept of intentionality to political discourse in Samoa and the U.S., anthropologists’ accounts of the opacity of other minds in Pacific societies, and the embodiment of intentions in jazz improvisation. Duranti takes up the stalled opposition between, on the one hand, analytic philosophy of language–which tends towards individualistic conceptions of intentions–and, on the other hand, linguistic anthropology–which rejects this armchair universalizing, offering counterexamples of contexts where inner states are not socially salient. In making the case for a continuum of intentionality, he offers a way to reconcile this opposition: the salience of intentions varies across individuals and cultures, and with it, the social and linguistic elaboration of being-in-the-world varies too. For Duranti, intentionality is an irreducibly intersubjective phenomenon: an individual’s ostensible, performed, and uniquely conceived meaning is always in tension with the meaning interpreted and evaluated by a community, whether present or not. We are not just beings in the world: we always exist in a world of others. This intersubjective tension undergirds the social construction of, for example, authenticity and responsibility in politics, the ability to be an active listener in music, and the translation of a concept from one social world to another. This interview discusses The Anthropology of Intentions in relation to Duranti’s wide-ranging academic career, up to and including his recent sabbatical excursions into the ancient Greek world in search of the origins of the notions of intention, mind, and soul. [Afterword. Alessandro Duranti contributed to a special edition of Journal of Ethnographic Theory (Vol 7, No 2, 2017) in which he discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here.] John Weston is an Associate Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on the relationships between language, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Rachel Seelig, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, works against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study. Looking at four writers, Seelig presents Jewish literature in the Weimar Republic as the product of a dynamic encounter between East and West. This is a very interesting and groundbreaking work of scholarship. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape writers’ reputations. Born and educated in Ukraine, Vynnycheko had to leave his homeland shortly after the emergence of the Soviet Union: his political vision considerably differed from the developments introduced and supported by the Soviet leaders. Extensively traveling across Europe, Vynnychenko was trying to maintain a fragile connection with his homeland: this connection was primarily constructed and nourished by the writers imagination. In spite of persecution, Vynnychenko ventured a few intermittent returns to Soviet Ukraine; however, he never had a chance to settle down in his home country again. France became one of the places where he attempted to develop a new sense of home and belonging; but this attempt was always imbued with the writers longing and nostalgia for Ukraine. Detailing the trajectory of Vynnychenko’s traveling/wandering, Mykola Soroka introduces the concepts of homeland and hostland, contributing to the discussion of exile literature. Negotiating the notions of exile, expatriate, nomad, diaspora, Soroka’s research offers a notion that includes different shadows of writers and the works they produce outside their homelands–displacement. Vynnychenko’s life and literary career exemplifies displacement that, in fact, can hardly be described as stable and concrete. Although inherently including some negative connotations (displacement hints at leaving a comfort zone), displacement is also nourished by change, movement, and transformation. As Soroka’s research demonstrates, Vynnycheko’s style changes and develops as he travels and as he attempts to adjust to new environments. Faces of Displacement is structured around two major stages of Vynnycheko’s balancing between his homeland and hostland(s): 1907-1914 and 1920-1951. Soroka provides detailed accounts of the writer’s negotiations with his multiple selves that arise as the external environments change. Astute artistic and psychological observations are accompanied by historical and political considerations that contribute to the proliferation of the research discussion. Reconstructing an intricate system of overlapping layers, Faces of Displacement offers new perspectives for the exploration of Vynnychenko’s works and for the investigation of literature that emerges on the edges of consciousness when homelands and hostlands intersect. In addition to an insightful analysis of works that establish Vynnychenko’s literary reputation (The Black Panther and the Polar Bear (1911), The Solar Machine (1928), The Leprosarium (1938), to name but a few), Faces of Displacement also considers the writer’s political activity and love of painting as one of significant factors. This consideration allows to present Vynnychenko’s works in the context of interdisciplinary investigations: Vynnychenko’s political aspirations appear to have been informed by his ethic and aesthetic principles; conversely, political and ideological nuances are part of the writer’s literary vision. In Ukraine, Vynnychenko’s works were banned for a few decades. His final novel, Take the Floor, Stalin! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017) editors Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, and Claire F. Fox bring together an exceptional cadre of scholars to dispel the notion that Latinas/os are newcomers to the Midwest. Through seventeen penetrating essays, this collection explores the trajectory of Latina/o migration, their demographic transformation of the Midwest, importance as laborers, neighbors, and community builders, as well as their struggles to obtain social and economic justice. Collectively, the essays within this anthology make several important interventions concerning the distinctiveness of the Midwest in the Latina/o experience and the effect it has had on identity formation and social activism. The presentation of the Midwest as a “border space” (i.e., contact zone) for Latina/o migrants from various parts of Latin America is a central theme that runs throughout the book. This anthology is an essential addition to Latina/o studies scholarship as it challenges the bi-coastal normativity and exclusivity of existing scholarship. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature (Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 2016) Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary character in ancient Jewish texts, taking into account all the references to this figure preserved in ancient Jewish literature from the exilic period to the early second century C.E.: Exodus 15:20-21; Deuteronomy 24:8-9; Numbers 12:1-15; 20:1; 26:59; 1 Chronicles 5:29; Micah 6:4, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q365 6 II, 1-7; 4Q377 2 I, 9; 4Q543 1 I, 6 = 4Q545 1 I, 5; 4Q546 12, 4; 4Q547 4 I, 10; 4Q549 2, 8), Jubilees 47:4; Ezekiel the Tragedian 18; Demetrius Chronographer frag. 3; texts by Philo of Alexandria: De vita contemplativa 87; Legum allegoriae 1.76; 2.66-67; 3.103; De agricultura 80-81; Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 9:10; 20:8, and finally texts by Josephus: Antiquitates judaicae 2.221; 3.54; 3.105; 4.78. These texts demonstrate that the picture of Miriam preserved in the ancient Jewish texts is richer than the Hebrew Bible suggests. The results provide a contradictory image of Miriam. On the one hand she becomes a tool of Levitical politics, whereas on the other she continues to enjoy a freer role. People continued to interpret earlier literary traditions in light of new situations, and interpretations varied in different contexts. Second, in light of poststructuralist literary studies that treat texts as reflections of specific social situations, Tervanotko argues that the treatment of Miriam in ancient Jewish literature reflects mostly a reality in which women had little space as active agents. Despite the general tendency to allow women only little room, the references to Miriam suggest that at least some prominent women may have enjoyed occasional freedom. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, addresses this lacuna in Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (Oxford University Press, 2017). Through a detailed analysis and lucid translation of the literary tradition of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (d. 1636), the tradition’s most important poet, Gill challenges and critiques current modes of Sikh scholarship. Bhai Gurdas’ poetry shaped early Sikh theology and practice, providing an emotive lexicon for communal identity. Gill highlights some of the most important of Gurdas’vars in articulating key themes in his writing, including spiritual death, martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine love. These tropes often emerge in the context of relationships with Sikh leadership, such as the martyr Guru Arjan and his son Guru Hargobind. In our conversation we discussed the state of Sikh Studies, the founding tradition around Guru Nanak and the transformations that shaped Gurdas’ life, the Sikh canon and its broader textual landscape, Islamicate influences, the manuscript tradition, practices of feet veneration, scholarly orientalism, translational practices, and interfaith engagement. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s about a doctor who takes animals and tries to make them human by surgically alerting them. I don’t remember much about the movie–I think Burt Lancaster played Moreau–but what I remember is that the story really creeped me out. It stayed with me for a long time. And, even now, as I remember those half-man, half-beasts that populate Dr. Moreau’s island, I’m creeped out. The feeling is something like a primordial shiver. Now you may attribute that feeling to the sensitivity of a seven-year-old, and that’s probably right: what were my parents thinking letting me watch a horror movie at that age? Edwards, however, has a different answer, one based on Well’s original story. It’s that these man-beasts that Wells imagines force us to realize us that we are, in our essence, animals. This realization is something that, as a culture and as individuals, we don’t like to contemplate. It unnerves us. It creeps us out. And that’s what Edward’s book explores: it is, among other things, a case against human exceptionalism, one that asks us not only to rethink our animal selves, but also our relationship to those other creatures who share our animality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. Voices also give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstraction, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Karmen MacKendrick’s The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings (Fordham University Press, 2016) explores all this and more through theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and semiotics. It is a beautifully written and challenging book. Karmen MacKendrick is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the differences between different types of literature. He uses colonial Egypt as a geographic focus of inquiry and demonstrates how literary traditions changed the act of reading: his examples include the Rosetta Stone and translations of the Qur’an. He thus demonstrates that literary reading (to be distinguished from how reading was conceptualized in Egypt before the colonial period) requires different ethical capacities and sensibilities and how they were gradually institutionalized by different genres of texts. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused and initiated by the programs aimed at the redefinition of economy and society. The spheres of family and economy appear to not only absorb changes and transformations instigated by the strengthening of communist rhetoric, but also to exercise influences on the formation and on the development of Soviet literature, reshaping the aesthetic continuum and revealing the collision of paradigms and epistemes. While focusing on the texts that illuminate the peculiarities of Russian Modernism (Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Yuri Olesha’s Envy), Alternative Kinships also includes a detailed discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Miroslav Krleza’s The Return of Filip Latinovicz, and Isak Dinesen’s stories. This comparative attempt discloses intricate interconnections not only between literatures and cultures but between ideologies and political programs as well. Jacob Emery points out, “Like the authors of Russian modernism, Hawthorne, Krlea, and Dinesen are concerned with alternative kinships that take shape at a moment of crisis in the history of hereditary castes: the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, and, in Dinesen’s historical fiction, a preoccupation with inheritance mechanisms in the period just before and after the French Revolution “(10-11). Literature appears to respond to political developments, which bring forth crucial shifts, redefining the areas of the familiar and of the conventional. As Alternative Kinships demonstrates, Soviet literature offers an array of intriguing possibilities for reshaping family relationships. In addition, these experiments are inextricably connected with the Soviet economic endeavors. One of the fascinating family experiments that Jacob Emery extensively comments on is “milk kinship,” which, under the Soviet regime,” aimed to replac[e] traditional ideas of kinship” (113). State-run milk banks, Emery argues, is “the metaphor of a transcendental mother supplying a universal family” (115). Russian modernism generates a number of scenarios, portraying not only the redefinition of social and economic relations but also the transformation of the individual: alternative kinships call for New Men and Women. Alongside family relationships, which respond to economic, political, ideological modifications, Alternative Kinships also touches upon hereditary memory: family is inseparable from the memory that reveals itself in multiple ways. Aesthetic and literary interconnections that Jacob Emery outlines through the analysis of gothic and modernist texts initiate a conversation about cultural memory: literary texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of the aesthetics, history, society, and the individual. Literature as a complex construct that incorporates a number of components and fragments, which establish a variety of relationships, can be illustrated with the image of mirror, which is closely analyzed in Alternative Kinships. Mirror is actively employed to show family relationships and to reveal the potential of a literary text to absorb and to respond to the environment. Revealing the dynamics of family and economy relationships across times and cultures, Alternative Kinships contributes to the discussion of international modernism(s), Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth (Book One) and Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth (Book Two), which follow the last humans eleven generations removed from Earth as their 10-mile-long spaceship arrives on a new planet. As befits a man who wears many hats, Tomlinson’s books are not easily categorized, mixing mystery, science fiction, cultural commentary and adventure. The third book in the series, Children of the Divide, is due out in August. Rob Wolf is the author of the science fiction novels The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema, and his work has been singled out for excellence by the New York Public Library, The Missouri Review, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, the author brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism. Author Ira Dworkin is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University who specializes in African American and African Diaspora literature, American literature and culture, race and ethnicity studies, and transnational literatures. After Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Dworkin’s current book project is focused on two autobiographies published by African Muslim and American Civil War soldier Nicholas Said in 1867 and 1873, tentatively titled Imperfectly Known: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative. The work will consider the place of Africa, including Islamic religious traditions, in early African American narrative by examining oral accounts within African American communities, northern literary venues like the Atlantic Monthly, and publishing in the Reconstruction-era South. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, explores the work of 11 writers who lived in the wheatbelt of southwestern Australia. Delving into the creative writing of authors like Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Jack Davis, he helps us understand the human effects of this massive-scale agriculture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivating stories. In his meticulously conducted research, Allan Pasco argues that Honor de Balzac was not only a storyteller: he was “a sociologist avant l’heure” (113) and “a competent historian” (234). Balzac, Literary Sociologist offers a detailed analysis of more than ten literary pieces. While emphasizing Balzac’s mastery in managing plots and narratives, Allan Pasco invites his readers to pay close attention to the aspects that help reconstruct historical and sociocultural environments of nineteenth-century France. Undergoing a tumultuous period that involved a number of deep, drastic and dramatic changes, France was struggling with the rudiments of the past that were holding back the development of the country; at the same time, new developments did not effectively contribute to the construction of a stable society: a vision of the future was blurry. A conflict of the old and the young, involving a wide array of themes and motives, appears to epitomize the disruptions defining nineteenth-century French society. Poverty, corruption, ambitions of the aristocracy, despair of the poor signaled the old’s inability (and lack of willingness and desire) to implement new and productive changes; the young, on the other hand, more often than not lacked knowledge and experience to overcome stagnation. Moreover, disruptions were augmented by the loss of moral virtues: honesty, benevolence, dignity, kindness, love were often sacrificed for money that became a new god. In his analysis, Allan Pasco offers a new reading of Balzac’s works which can be considered acute and insightful commentaries on the phenomena outlining a transformational period in the history of French society. In addition to the predictable topics (class, aristocracy, church and religion, the rich and the poor, etc.), Balzac, Literary Sociologist includes insightful explorations of topics which appear to be rather symptomatic in terms of the society’s crises: suicide, failed marriages, fatherless children, the stagnation of the province and the hardships of the city life. Allan Pasco also draws attention to Balzac’s comments on life in Paris: Paris is presented as a significant locus epitomizing struggles of the country and of the individual. Undoubtedly, historical and sociocultural permutations involve not only society but the individual as well. As Allan Pasco’s research demonstrates, Balzac through his individual stories, which, at a larger scale, constitute an extensive vision of the society and the world, was responding to the historical environment that was shaping the individuals inner world. From this perspective, Balzac’s works highlight the interconnectedness of the inside and outside worlds: captivating stories are pretexts to sociological and philosophical speculations and observations. In his book, Allan Pasco states that Balzac was a sociologist and a historian: in this interview, the author adds that Balzac was “a great historian.” Balzac, Literary Sociologist proves inexhaustible potential and power of literature. Allan H. Pasco is the Hall Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In her book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes in the writings of Western Australian author Tim Winton. By tracing ideas of class, gender, place, landscape, and belonging in Winton’s numerous works, she demonstrates how his writing eludes easy classification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence between the two modes of return, rather than dealing with them as mutually exclusive. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know what had happened nor did they want to relive it themselves. It was just too horrible to relate. The truth about combat in those conflicts, so we are told, was therefore suppressed. In Vietnam, the truth was also suppressed, but in a different way and for altogether different reasons. As Gary Kulik demonstrates in his remarkable book ‘War Stories’: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers–What Really Happened in Vietnam (Potomac Books, 2009), some Vietnam veterans came back from the war and, far from hesitating to tell their “war stories,” exaggerated and even invented them. This was particularly true of atrocity tales, which were both numerous and well broadcast. As Kulik explains, the point of these false atrocity stories was not to portray the “grunts” in a bad light. On the contrary, the tellers of the tales portrayed themselves–with the aid of the anti-war media and what might be called the anti-war psychological establishment–as victims. Victims of what? The ‘American War Machine’ (my phrase, not Kulik’s)– a monstrous, immoral creation that ground vast quantities of men and material–American and Vietnamese–into dust for no good purpose. The ‘American War Machine,’ so Americans were told in the Winter Soldiers’ testimony, in a huge memoir literature, and in blockbuster films, produced atrocities that then in turn produced the broken, lost, and possibly insane Vietnam vet of popular folk memory. Think John Rambo or Travis Bickle. Kulik’s point is not that American soldiers committed no atrocities in Vietnam. They did, and they were too many of them. Nor is it to claim that American soldiers were not, in some cases, badly traumatized by their Vietnam experience. Some were, and too many of them. His argument is that the truth about Vietnam–that it was basically a war like others Americans have fought in the twentieth century, not one that produced a flood of atrocities and psychologically wounded soldiers–has been suppressed by those who wanted to tell politically-charged “war stories.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as well as detailed cultural and political histories of the many interactions between drugs and religion, specifically Islam. From the beginning of the book the reader expects the story to culminate in the author’s experiential encounter with a visionary plant brew called ayahuasca, indigenous to South America and now popular throughout the globe, as a portal into the spiritual world. The twists and turns leading up to this encounter give the book some amount of narrative suspense, but it’s a page-turner in any case. The reader, during her journey through Knight’s narrative, will learn about how coffee was initially banned by Muslims and how socio-economics allowed wine–although explicitly forbidden by authoritative religious texts–a status over marijuana, which was not explicitly forbidden but still seen as a drug for the lower classes. The reader also learns about philosophical debates over authority to interpret Islamic metaphysical doctrines and how the world of academia functions. That the book’s subtitle includes writing makes itself clear throughout the text as well, and readers who enjoy reflecting on the recreational as well as existential dramas of written language will find themselves gripped by Knight’s process. He wrote the book, moreover, during his transition into a PhD program in religious studies, after already making a name for himself as a successful author of several books. Because of the liminal space from which he writes Tripping with Allah, as well as its artistic precision, the book should appeal to broad audiences and Islamic studies specialists alike. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Over the course of a long and adventurous life, Henry Alsberg was guided by the constancy of his passion for radical causes. This focus, as Susan Rubenstein DeMasi makes clear in Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland, 2016) defined both his varied career choices and his greatest achievements. Alsbeg’s radicalism was a constant of his life from an early age, and led him to abandon his initial employment as a lawyer for more fulfilling work as a journalist and author. After several years in revolution-plagued eastern Europe as a correspondent during and after the First World War, Alsberg returned to the United States to become a theater producer. Despite the success of his English-language translation of the play The Dybbuk, by the time the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s Alsberg was facing the same challenges as millions of other Americans in finding work. Not only did the New Deals Federal Writers’ Project provide him with employment but, as DeMasi demonstrates, with projects such as the multivolume American Guide and the compiling of the oral histories of former slaves he shepherded some of the most enduring cultural legacies of the era, ones which serve as monuments to his own blend of political values and artistic creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions. Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations. On this program, we talk about her new translation of Augustine’s Confessions, published by The Modern Library in June 2017. Publishers Weekly has called it “delightfully readable while still densely theological. In this lively translation filled with vivid, personal prose, Ruden introduces readers to a saint whom many will realize they only thought they knew.” Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath them” (1). Over the past half-century boxing has endured a strange fate: a fall from cultural dominance simultaneous to a rise in payouts so enormous that top fighters are the most valuable athletes on the planet. A puzzle like this attracts the fighter, the fan, and the scholar; and boxing is full of such befuddlers. Expressive of a variety of injustices and imbalances of power, boxing offers careful analysts the chance to look beyond the perfectly pebbled abs and airbrushed promotional photos to see into the lives of the people cross-pressured by vast economic and cultural forces both at their command and beyond their control. Enter The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside (University of Chicago Press, 2017) edited by Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra; a new collection of original essays that probes the mysteries of the sport, business, and spectacle of boxing, asking us to look again at one hundred years of history at the fights. Bringing together essays by fighters, managers, and keen observers of boxing’s past and present, this collection restores the qualitative weight of what appear to be quantitative measures–like a fighter’s win-loss record–peeling back the layers of history and culture and life experience in events and careers in the fight industry. While they engage the legacy of boxings all-time greats, the writers here also plumb the networks of amateur and Olympic fighters, trainers, managers, and administrators who make up the vast majority of those in the fight world. Often correcting for the force of the “invisible numbers” behind the record book page, this book’s perspectives from around the fight world reveal the ways in which national culture, race, gender, and social status open and close opportunities for a professional fighter, and influence current and future earning potential. Fitness, skill, speed, and style can lift a fighter to greatness, but it takes a different level of savvy to carve an opening in the industry in a fighter’s post-prime; a savvy that the sport itself may need to capture in a culture that seems to have moved on to younger, stronger attractions. For sports historians, fight fans, and observers of American writing, The Bittersweet Science provides a potent sampling of “either the glorious last stand or amazing comeback of boxing writing as a genre of literature,” and offers fans and scholars the analytical tools and historical perspective to make meaning of fighters climbing into the ring. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions. Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations. Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, affect studies, and more, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (University of Washington Press, 2017) considers how time was transformed with the rise of capitalist modernity, and illustrates the significance of a language of dreams and dreaming as writers sought to cope with this transformation and its consequences. Chan offers careful readings of the work of several writers as a way to tell this story, from Lu Xun’s prose poetry to fiction by Mao Dun, Yang Mo, and Zong Pu. Chan concludes by reflecting on how this context might inform how we understand the notion of the Chinese Dream, and arguing that paying attention to the materiality of literary texts can help us discover the aesthetic resources for articulating hope. It’s a fascinating study that makes significant contributions to how we understand the relationship between time, dreaming, and materiality in modern literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds to the richness and diversity of our national literary culture. Now you might be thinking that I’m about to ask you for a donation. I’m not. Though if you want to contribute to the New Books Network and its public mission to widen the intellectual life of America, by all means please do so. We’d appreciate it. No, what I want to do is make the point that, while books from small literary presses are one place that our literary culture thrives, it’s not the only one. Crucial to our national literature are the small journals and reviews that publish our writers. These venues–and there are hundreds of them in print and, increasingly, online–foster our younger writers and promote the work of our established one, especially work that is non-commercial or experimental. Literary journals and reviews offer readers diverse voices and diverse aesthetics. They’re the forum through which our literary culture thrives and expands and reinvigorates itself. And they are usually run by editors who work for almost nothing, on almost-nothing budgets, editors who believe in literature as much as the authors they publish. Today I talk to one of those editors. Tommy Mira y Lopez is the co-founder and co-editor of Territory, a new venue that has not only taken up the time-honored task of providing readers with new work from newer writers, but that’s also creating something like a new micro-genre of literature, one that combines visual maps and literary text. If you’ve ever found yourself looking at an old map and thinking how intriguing it is or, when reading a story, if you’ve ever imagined yourself picturing its imaginary landscape, you’ll be excited to explore Territory and the new terrains of literature its fostering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016), William Kolbrener, professor of English at Bar Ilan University in Israel, explores the life and thought of Joseph Soloveitchik, the scion of the Brisk rabbinic dynasty, from both literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. The result is both a compelling critique of extant receptions of Soloveitchik’s thought and a nuanced exploration of the sources and struggles at the root of the Rav’s towering intellectual and halakhic achievements. The book will be of interest to students of rabbinic hermeneutics, modern Jewish thought, psychoanalysis, and the Western philosophical tradition — all intellectual realms in which Soloveitchik was well versed. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for consideration; furthermore, a printed item itself shapes the environment, revealing and producing further developments and proliferations. In From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Allison E. Fagan invites her readers to explore not only a magic world of the literature that arises out of collaboration of national, ethnic, political, social, literary borders, but also multilayered networks produced by books, which infiltrate readers’, writers’, editors’, publishers’, and translators’ communication. As the title prompts, From the Edge discusses border literature; however, Fagan makes a step further and includes in her analysis books which do not fall under the category of conventional border literature. Through this gesture, From the Edge broadens the area of inquiry and brings a wider scope of questions for the discussion: what is border literature and what borders do we (or should we) consider? The borders Fagan discusses and negotiates are connected with books as printed items. Outlining a theoretical framework which to some extent relies on the postmodern principles, Fagan seems to initiate a conversation about books as in-flux items: when printed and circulated among the participants of readership (understood in its broadest sense), books not only deliver different stories about writing, reading, and publishing, but also shape current discourses strengthening some aspects and weakening others. From the Edge shifts conventional margins to centers. This research offers a detailed discussion of paratextual elements: glossaries, typography, editorial paratexts, readers notes. In “My Book Has Been the Light of Day,” Fagan brings attention to recovery projects: books that were re-discovered and re-introduced to readers. While the stories about books that were once considered lost are intriguing and captivating, an academic inquiry brings forth a wide range of discussions: How are books re-discovered? How is their readership established? What do recovered books communicate about the past and present reading environments? What is accomplished through recovery projects? In her research, Fagan initiates, among others, these questions and invites readers, writers, editors, critics, scholars, translators to shift the boundaries of the existing conversations about print cultures and communication, literary traditions and language, ethnicity and nationality, self and identity. Allison E. Fagan is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and a major contribution to the study of the cultures of the Caucasus. The book examines literary representations of anticolonial violence in the Caucasus across more than a century-long period of time. The monographs central focus is on the figure of abrek (bandit), prominent across all three national literatures under scrutiny. Gould explores the figure of abrek through the prism of what she calls “transgressive sanctity” –“the process though which sanctity is made transgressive and transgression is made sacred through violence against the state.” Through this process, violence is aesthetisized and aesthetics is endowed with the capacity to generate violence. Of particular interest is Gould’s approach to the study of violence an investigation in which, she suggests, literature can and should play a central role. Writers and Rebels is based on eight years of fieldwork, and the reading and analysis of many previously untapped sources, in particular, the Arabic-language texts from Dagestan. This local literacy and the diversity of sources allows Gould to challenge the postulates of existing theoretical frameworks, such as postcolonialism as it applies to the studies of the Caucasus, and search for new scholarly trajectories which take into account the utter cultural and linguistic diversity of the region. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible. Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, had been translated into English, despite a long-standing recognition of their importance to philosophical debates in the period, including by Fondane’s contemporaries, such as Lev Shestov and Albert Camus. A new collection entitled Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays edited and translated by Bruce Baugh and published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, aims to rectify this. Professor Baugh, who teaches Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, has written extensively on existential thought and continental philosophy, and is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003). Professor Baugh’s work on Fondane will be of interest to a wide variety of readers seeking a better understanding of a thinker whose work invites consideration alongside his better known contemporaries Walter Benjamin and the early Levinas, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speaking Islamic elite around the cultural framework of the central royal court. These projects often revolved around cross-cultural textual production and translation, putting Sanskrit and Persian works in conversation. The production of Mughal-backed texts, and the literary reflection or silence about Brahman and Jain participation reveals unexplored horizons for understanding South Asia imperial history. In our conversation we discussed the dynamics of the Mughal court, the influential leaders Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, Persian translation of Sanskrit epics, the integration of Sanskrit materials into imperial knowledge, the end of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, and the tricky reception of contested histories in contemporary India. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) Ya damn right Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? (Shaft) Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out When there’s danger all about? (Shaft) Right on They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother – (Shut your mouth) But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft – (Then we can dig it) He’s a complicated man But no one understands him but his woman (John Shaft) –Theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes Mention Shaft and most people think of Gordon Park’s seminal 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree in a leather coat, walking the streets of Manhattan to Isaac Hayes’ iconic theme music. But the black private dick that inspired the black action cinema/blaxploitation film genre actually made his debut on the printed page as the creation of white novelist Ernest Tidyman, who was a seasoned journalist down on his luck when he decided to try his hand at fiction. Shaft was the result, giving Tidyman the break he was looking for. The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series (McFarland, 2015) is based on the extensive research of Ernest Tidyman’s personal papers, and tells the story of John Shaft from the perspective of his creator the original source. The book also provides new insight and analyses of the writing of the Shaft novels, the films, and the television series. The World of Shaft also features first-ever coverage of the forgotten Shaft newspaper comic strip, and includes previously unseen artwork. Also included are Shaft’s recent 21st century reappearances on the printed page, in both comic book and prose form. Steve Aldous is a British banker by day and an enthusiastic writer, film fanatic and avid reader of crime fiction by night. In addition to The World of Shaft, he has written a number of well-received short stories in a wide range of styles and genres, and has been short-listed in the Writers Forum magazine short story competition. His as yet unpublished novel, a crime thriller entitled Poisoned Veins, features a modern-day black Manchester-based private investigator Joe Gibbs, and is inspired in part by Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft. Aldous resides Bury, Lancashire, UK and is a proud father of three and a loving grandfather. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Carrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry, modern dance, film, and popular entertainment. Inspired by noh’s practice of retelling stories in different styles and tenses, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) also weaves together a number of writing styles, and incorporates Preston’s own lessons in noh chant, dance, and drumming and experience writing plays based on noh models and choreographing dances with noh-related gestures throughout the book. The result is a fascinating exploration of the relationships between pedagogy and performance traced through the work of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and others. Learning to Kneel pays special attention to the politics of performance and pedagogy and the themes of submission and subversion, and urges a rethinking of many assumptions that we bring to understanding noh and its translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, Caner Dagli, and Mohammad Rustom). The book is a remarkable achievement. The text features a complete new translation of the Quran as well as multiple complementary essays written by leading scholars of Quranic studies. The tome also includes over a million words of running commentary from Muslim exegetes across the centuries including contributions from Sunni, Shii, and Sufi schools of thought among others. This feature, in particular, showcases its encompassing and truly oceanic scope. The text proves noteworthy as well, given its intersection between confessional scholarship and Western academic approaches to Islamic studies. The text has already begun to make waves across North America and beyond and has set a new precedent as not only a translation but also a reference work on Quran. Its user-friendly organization, moreover, will make the text accessible to just about anyone as it offers levels of depth according to what the reader seeks. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Henry and Emily Folger were linked together not just by their love for one another, but their shared passion for the works of William Shakespeare. In Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Stephen H. Grant describes how the two of them devoted their lives to acquiring Shakespeare’s works and related artifacts and how that collection became the cornerstone of one of the great cultural institutions in the world today. Though his interest in Shakespeare developed during his time at Amherst College, Henry Folger chose a career in business and began working for Standard Oil while in law school. It was through his membership in a literary circle that he met Emily, a Vassar graduate who taught in Brooklyn. As husband and wife they spent their time combing through catalogues, traveling, and engaging in constant correspondence with booksellers and others in search of First Folios and other rare works of early modern English literature. While they were reticent about their collection during their lifetime, the two sought to memorialize their success with what became the Folger Shakespeare Library, a research institution funded by the fortune Henry built up over half a century and guided to realization after his death by Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explores the admiring and at times oppositional philosophical kinship between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the France’s greatest 20th century philosophers. One fundamental aspect of the Levinas-Derrida relationship is each man’s relationship to his Jewish identity and to Jewish text and tradition. Professor Hammerschlag delves into the resonances and far-reaching effects this relationship has for religion writ large, as well as for philosophy, literature, ethics, and political theology. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

There’s a common myth about the history of comic books and strips. It’s the idea that the medium languished for decades as a sort of time-wasting hobby for children, but now has redeemed itself and can be appreciated even by the literary. University of Georgia professor and comics scholar Christopher Pizzino argues that this history is as false as Clark Kent’s eyeglass prescription. Comics, he says, are still burdened by their early stigma, their status in modern culture tenuous at best. In Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature (University of Texas Press, 2016), Pizzino offers up an educated and entertaining history of the comics medium, then devotes a chapter to each of four groundbreaking comic artists. In one, he looks at the film noir and manga-influenced work of Frank Miller, creator of The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. Another chapter examines the work of Alison Bechdel, whose famed lesbian-centered comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, led to pop culture’s Bechdel Test, and whose autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home is now a hit musical. Charles Burns, whose Black Hole tells a haunting story of a teenage plague, is highlighted as an artist unable to sugarcoat his work even when he was trying to have his art published in Playboy magazine. And Gilbert Hernandez, best known for his innovative Love and Rockets series, created with his brother Jaime, shows himself to be nigh-fearless when it comes to his work, blending everything from erotica to violence to a biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Join Pizzino and pop-culture junkie and author Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (no relation to Archie Comics’ Betty Cooper) for a lively look at comics and their evolution, and why the very idea that the medium has safely come of age may be working against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were popular in the Soviet Union, Tsipursky contributes to the discussion concerning the shaping of Soviet mentality and consciousness. Briefly describing traditions that the Soviet Union was referring to when devising cultural programs, Socialist Fun focuses on the post-War period and offers a detailed analysis of leisure time activities during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Considering the developments of cultural programs devised and maintained by Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Tsipursky outlines his theory regarding the development of the Soviet society. Sponsored by the state, the cultural sphere in the USSR appears a part of gardening policies: through a variety of entertainment activities, the state was implementing strategies to shape and direct Soviet peoples thinking. In this regard, leisure culture was one of the areas that invited discreet methods of the states control. Tsipursky also puts his discussion of Soviet culture into broader historical, sociological, and ideological contexts. The Soviet Union is viewed as an alternative modernity project. As Tsipursky illustrates, this project was gradually evolving, receiving the utmost support during the Khrushchev era. The detailed analysis of cultural programs that Tsipursky provides also expands the understanding of the concept of New Soviet Men and Women. As Socialist Fun demonstrates, this concept was subject to modifications: over the decades, emphases on isolationist and militant aspects, supported by Stalin, shifted to more open and cosmopolitan nuances, maintained by Khrushchev. Socialist Fun is based on a substantial analysis of archival materials; it also includes a vast amount of interviews that offer a glimpse into the life of Soviet people. The research offers a captivating narrative of how Soviet people organized their leisure time. Socialist Fun includes extensive information on club activities, dancing, music, theatre, literature, etc. In addition, a comprehensive survey highlights the history of jazz in the Soviet Union. This research is also supplemented with exclusive photos and stories shared by people who were creating and engaging in socialist fun. Gleb Tsipursky is assistant professor of history at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne Griffith’s The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) is one of a few detailed studies of this program and the people and institutions that made it possible. Griffith makes important arguments about the combined force of letters, texts and broadcasts, and the ways they contributed to emerging nationalisms and territorial identities as the British Caribbean considered its postcolonial future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree in African American Studies from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. He is now an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on African American Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, LGBT Literature and Culture, Global Black Literature and Literary Theory. His research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century Black and American literature and the arts. Carrington has devoted particular attention to considerations of cultural production and identity, especially those articulated in feminist criticism, critical race theory, performance studies and Marxism. In addition to his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, Dr. Carringtons writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out!, Callaloo, and African & Black Diaspora. In 2015, he organized the first international Queers & Comics conference through CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. His current research project, “Audiofuturism,” explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects. This is one of the central concerns for Benjamin Schreier, Associate Professor at Penn State University, in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015). He calls for a critical study of identity and identification within his field, which should have broader applications in other identity-based investigations. Schreier provides a comprehensive and productive reevaluation of approaches to identity, which explores the meaning and power of the uses of identity in literary products. He puts his new approach into action through a rereading of key works and authors from an established Jewish American literary canon. On the other end of the spectrum, he tests the boundaries of the deployment of Jewishness when it does not align with the dominant assumptions in Jewish American literary study. In our conversation we discussed the place of Jewish American Literary studies within adjacent fields, the dominant scholarly practices of this field, racialized nationalist grounds of Jewishness, Abraham Cahan’s spectral Jew, the New York Intellectuals, the anxiety of Jewish identity in Philip Roth’s work, the irrepresentation of identity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and how to think about identity as an analytical category. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which, in spite of the geographical limitations implied by its name, appeared to invite artists from a variety of geographical loci and aesthetic backgrounds. Literature, Exile, Alterity focuses on seven founding members of the New York Group: Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Bohdan Rubchak, Zhenia Vasylkivska, Patricia Kylyna, Emma Andijevska, and Vira Vovk. Acquiring its shape during the 1950s and 1960s and actively participating in the cultural, social, and political dialogues during the subsequent decades, the New York Group expanded and eventually went rather far beyond its original core. Over the decades, the group also dispersed geographically; however, as Rewakowicz argues, it retained its aesthetic and philosophical essentials revolving around the notions of home/homeland, exile, the collaboration of the center and the periphery, political and social impetus of poetry, poetic forms and meanings they generate, etc. Rewakowicz contextualizes the New York Group from the viewpoint of the poets relationship with their native language(s): writing in Ukrainian was a conscious choice for the majority of the groups members. Language thus is presented not only in terms of creative enterprise but also in terms of political, social, and cultural negotiations. As the research attests, the members of the group situate themselves in opposition to Soviet Ukraine, to the mainstream culture (both in Ukraine and the US), and to the literary conventions supported by the literary establishments. From this perspective, the groups focus on linguistic choices and preferences marks a gesture toward re-inventing selves and poetry, re-negotiating selves and others, and disrupting the mainstream. In addition to the theoretical framework for the discussion of the New York Group phenomenon, Literature, Exile, Alterity also offers an exquisite analysis of the poetry. Rewakowicz illuminates the multilayeredness the poets embrace and presents the groups diverse poetic experimentations as the engagement with altered selves. Existential undertones that the poetic works lavishly comprise are discussed in the context of Western European modernism. In spite of the strong modernist influences that the works of the New York Group demonstrate, the researcher also initiates a discussion of the group in terms of the overlapping of modernism and postmodernism. Literature, Exile, Alterity contributes to the discussion of modern Ukrainian literature from the perspective of intercultural and interliterary connections and influences. Rewakowicz also engages in the conversation regarding diverse intricacies of literary developments. Maria G. Rewakowicz, poet, translator, literary scholar, teaches Ukrainian literature at Rutgers. She received a PhD in Slavic Studies from the University of Toronto. Rewakowiczs research interests include: Ukrainian language, culture, and literature; language politics, literature and identity construction; feminism and nationalism in post-Soviet space; women and gender issues in literature; Ukrainian migr poetry; exile and literature; postcolonial studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment. Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance. Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9). Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how scientists and academics in general can improve their communication skills and harness the power of narrative to improve their writing and presentations. Narrative is an indispensable tool that geographers and others can use to communicate with our students and the general public. Yet Olson also shows how we can hone our narrative intuition and use our story sense to write better abstracts, articles, and grant applications. Houston, We Have a Narrative has gems of wisdom for physical geographers, human geographers, and academics of all stripes. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and ways to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that accompanied the emergence of East German literature from 1945-1959. Covering almost fifteen years, the research presents insightful observations of the literary process that happened to be intricately connected with the political turbulence. As Stephen Brockmann puts it, literature in East Germany was never about “just” literature: “It was always also about collective identity and the path toward a better future–however imaginary and illusive that future may be (7).” In the post-war Germany that happened to go through a division process, literature, culture affairs in general, appeared to be involved in the state making and identity construction. In the GDR in particular, literature was employed as a tool to re-direct national identity and memory. In this process, politicians and functionaries were shaping the cultural affairs through a close collaboration with writers and artists. It would be unfair to say that the officials were particularly eager to encourage artists to participate in the construction of a new state–the GDR-0that was, in fact, based on the historical and cultural past of Germany. In post-Nazi Germany, writers were taking an initiative to come to terms with the Nazi past, offering ways to move forward, putting the tragic past behind, and produce new history. While engaging with the memory of the past, writers were responding to the contemporary political developments, shaping the understanding of the present and outlining routes for the future. Brockmann narrates a detailed account of the cultural and political developments, successfully illustrating the intersections of the political and the cultural. Alongside the analyses of the exemplary works of East German writers (Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, etc.), Brockmann presents a vast collection of historical data confirming the collaboration of the politicians and artists in the matters of state and nation construction. Particular attention is given to the official organizations, which functioned to secure a certain development of the cultural affairs and that were extensively supported and governed by the functionaries. Brockmann’s research also includes an insightful investigation of the cooperation of GDR and the USSR, particular in terms of constructing an ideological foundation for the East Germany sector. While extensively incorporating German literary traditions into their endeavors to construct new literature, East German writers were also engaging with the influences exercised by Soviet propaganda and Soviet literature. The Writers’ State is an attempt to re-evaluate the 1940s and the 1950s in the history of German culture and literature. Brockmann challenges a cliche according to which this time period is rather uneventful in terms of cultural developments and re-discovers intriguing nuances of the East German literary landscape. Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). Dr. Brockmann also has courtesy appointments in the departments of English and History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a number of reasons, including a transformation in US-China relations, transformations in the world economy and international politics, the rise of a new era in media technologies (including the formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the US and East Asia, due in part to radio and telegraph technology and a transpacific transportation system) and the related emergence of a discourse of communications. In Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (Columbia University Press, 2016), So argues that literary histories of U.S.-China cultural encounter in the twentieth century must also, in part, be histories of media. So recasts the Pacific in the twentieth century as a site of mediation and traces the engagement with concepts of democracy through the work of such writers as Agnes Smedley, Pearl Buck, Paul Robeson, Lin Yutang, Ding Ling, Liu Liangmo, Lao She, and Ida Puitt. It’s a focused, compelling account with resonance for Asian studies, Asian American studies, and broader debates about literature, translation, networks, and media in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How was the ‘Book’ of Psalms formed, and why? The first question relates to the diachronic growth of the collection, while the second relates to issues of purpose–to what end are psalms being juxtaposed in a collection? On this show, David Willgren explains his surprising answers to these two fundamental questions as we talk about his recent book, The Formation of the ‘Book ‘of Psalms (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). By conceptualizing the ‘Book’ of Psalms as an anthology, and by inquiring into its poetics by means of paratextuality, David Willgren provides a fresh reconstruction of the formation of the ‘Book’ of Psalms and concludes, in contrast to the canonical approach, that it does not primarily provide a literary context for individual psalms. Rather, it preserves a dynamic selection of psalms that is best seen not as a ‘book’ of psalms, but as a canon of psalms. David Willgren received a ThD in Old Testament Exegesis from Lund University in 2016, and is currently lecturer at Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology. In addition to The Formation of the ‘Book’ of Psalms, he is co-editor and contributor to the book Studies in Isaiah: History, Theology, and Reception (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of the H-Law Legal History Podcast I talk with Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion, Sara L. Crosby about her new book, Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Crosby discusses how the trope of the female poisoner permeated popular literature in the mid-nineteenth century. In her analysis of the 1840 murder trial of Hannah Kinney, we see how the partisan press used the accused as a vessel through which to fight-out central political battles of the day. We then see how jury decisions may serve as a metric for determining which metaphors and cultural frames are prevailing at a point in time. Following a popular metaphor enables Crosby to track the cultural tides influencing law and politics in Jacksonian America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Readers of all ages know E. B. White’s work. Charlotte’s Web is the first book many children are read aloud. Elements of Style remains an essential reference book. Almost everyone has a favorite writing by White: his legendary essays; his humorous New Yorker captions and columns; his short stories about New York City; Stuart Little; The Trumpet of the Swan. Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is the first illustrated biography of this great American literary icon. Using her signature collage technique and in prose worthy of White himself, award-winning children’s book creator Melissa Sweet brings to life the writer, reporter, poet, animal lover, and doting father. His personal letters, photographs, and family memorabilia, all beautifully woven together with Sweet’s detailed artwork, help capture the essence of the man himself, not just his accomplishments. Melissa Sweet has illustrated nearly 100 children’s books from board books to picture books and non-fiction titles. She received Sibert Medals for Balloons over Broadway and The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant; Caldecott Honor Medals for both A River of Words and The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus; and two New York Times Best Illustrated citations. Learn more at: http://www.melissasweet.net. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’sBook Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies