New Books In Literary Studies

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity. Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of No

Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatures ought to be understood in opposition to one another. Featuring writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, D. H. Lawrence, John Sommerfield, H. G. Wells, and Walter Brierley, this study creates new critical space that reveals the modernism in the proletarian, and the proletarian in the modernist. It foregrounds ideas of intersubjectivity, intersectional struggles, and emancipatory discourses that rely on some way of relating the ‘I’ to the ‘We’. Covering the critical discourses that have shaped our understanding of these literary movements in the UK since the interwar period, Hubble brings his critical intervention to bear on the contemporary historical moment, and asks how the proletarian answer to the modernist question might inform our political and cultural imaginations as a neoliberal consensus co

Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan, who complicates these often-asked questions in his new book Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories (Indian University Press, 2017).  As we discuss, the title of this book is not an invitation to imagine an alternate history; rather, it is a provocation to notice how the key terms of this title get framed together in a variety of complicated, troubled, and sometimes dissonant ways — both by historians and by the protagonists of this history. A noteworthy and widely-read historian of German, Jewish, and Modern culture, Spector here targets the historiography of these fields and seeks to shake up the patterns and terms that have become all too stable within it. Modernism Without Jews? takes its readers through a series of case studies with short and d

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, explores the theological dimensions of invisibility within the intersection of race, religion, and secularism through the life and literary career of Ralph Ellison. Harris places Invisible Man and its reception within its contemporary context of literary and theological inquiry. Pairing this with a genealogy of Ellison’s proximity to religious scholars and writers reveals how his secular accounts are steeped in theological appeal. In our conversation we discussed the life of Ralph Ellison, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellison’s second novel, Ellison’s relationship with scholar of religion and literature, Nathan A. Scott Jr., Ellison’s love of nineteenth century American lite

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses of insanity. Reich discusses the interesting literary preoccupations of Soviet psychiatrists and psychiatric discourse in the post-Stalin era to help readers understand the context of these diagnoses of madness. Her book mines the works and experiences of dissidents, including Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Vol’pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and others, to weave a narrative that shows how Soviet writers contended with false accusations of mania and madness. She also shows how these writers sought to use their works to illustrate the pathology of post-Stalinist Soviet society. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word. In spite of seeming incongruity the AI and Victorian literature evoke, the two notions do establish a contact zone: the mind. AI and characters created by Victorian writers are connected by the individual’s attempt and desire to project their imaginative creations into the space outside the mind. In Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Megan Ward takes into consideration the development of technologies and outlines methods for the analysis of Victorian realist characters that can be presented as constructs that establish connections between the mind and technologies. Ward invites her readers to approach novels as information systems generating multiple meanings, which can be re-organized and

Originally published in 1994, Marc Leeds’ The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (Delacorte Press, 2016) was initially conceived of as a comprehensive A-Z guide to the expansive oeuvre of the American author Kurt Vonnegut. The encyclopedia was created as resource for scholars, teachers and casual fans of Vonnegut’s work and was comprised of detailed entries on all of his plays, novels and stories, in addition to descriptions of individual characters, narratives and motifs. Readers of Vonnegut will, of course, be aware that rather than distinct, hermetically sealed texts, each of Vonnegut’s works forms part of a larger fictional universe wherein characters, locations, turns of phrase and even consumer products cross back and forth between different novels, short stories and plays. As such, Leeds’ encyclopedia allows researchers and readers to cross reference recurring characters, words and plot points. The book also serves as something of a glossary of Vonnegut’s various neologisms (e.g. “foma” and “karass”) as well

Ever since the first clinical account of autism was published by Dr. Leo Kanner in 1943, Western culture has tended to mythologise the disorder as impenetrable, non-verbal and characterised by silence. As such, in both medical literature and popular culture, autistic individuals are depicted as incomprehensible and Other, problems to be rectified or puzzles to be solved. In contrast to this view of autism as an inscrutable enigma, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (University of Michigan Press, 2018) by Julia Miele Rodas explores the expressive, creative potential of the autist by opening up a host of literary texts to the “possibilities of autism.” Autistic Disturbances is therefore a unique contribution to the growing field of disability studies as it does not simply explore autism from the standard clinical or biographical perspective. Instead, this insightful new study sets out to engage with autistic modes of expression from a literary, cultural

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than scholars have previously thought. Borovaya makes her argument by focusing on the 16th-century vernacular literature of Moses Almosnino, a writer who was famous not only among Ottoman Sephardim, but also Jews and Christians throughout Europe. According to Borovaya, most scholars of Ladino literature of have placed the birth of genre in the 18th century, largely due to a false belief that works of high-culture were not composed in Ladino. She works against the assumption that Ladino was only used in popular, “folksy” writing, and the flawed categorization of high register Sephardi literature—like that of Moses Almosnino—as “Spanish” or “Castilian.” This tendency, Borovaya argues, wrongly implies that texts aimed at an educated audience were never written in the Ladi

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwell

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s Shanghai during wartime. Hull’s translation is a sensitive and humane rendering of characters that are by turns laughable and heartbreaking, coming together in a story about what it is to be a hero – or just to be a functional human being – in times of personal and social upheaval. As you’ll hear me say on the podcast, I actually **put down the most recent climactic issues of the Saga comic book** because the story here was so gripping. That’s to say: this is not just going to be a great book to teach and learn with. It’s also a gripping and fascinatingly rendered story in its own right. In this podcast, Hull and I continued some of the conversation about translation and its joys and challenges that we started in our previous podca

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries. Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for

Humor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions.  As one would expect, these pervasive phenomena occasion philosophical questions.  What renders some item or event humorous?  Are funny jokes objectively so?  As humor is a mode of interacting with others, can it be deployed irresponsibly?  Can it be harmful and impermissible?  What is the relation between humor and comedy?  What is a comedian? In Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy (Routledge 2018), Steven Gimbel presents a philosophical account of humor.  He develops a view according to which an act is humorous if and only if it is a conspicuous, intentional act of playful cleverness.  This account of humor then enables Gimbel to address a full palate of questions concerning jokes and comedy.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways that shocking and moving stories fix knowledge in the mind and demonstrate relationships—even grammatical relations—in unforgettable ways, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers readers interested in the history of pedagogy an exploration of the relationships between Anglo-Saxon students and teachers that tangles with both scholarly and popular expectations of the medieval mind. Addressing Anglo-Saxon uses of the culture of late antiquity, especially the form of the dialogue, The Experience of Education

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014) explores the extent to which the great medieval Hindu thinker Rāmānuja himself looked to the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (a 1st-4th century narrative work extolling the glories of the great god Viṣṇu) to bolster his theistic stance on the nature of truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures. Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018) explores the relationship between reading, dying, and mourning across three central texts: the Heian period The Tale of Genji; the twelfth century Illustrated Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji (or, Genji Scrolls); and the twenty-first century Resurrected Genji Scrolls exhibition. The book’s analysis pivots on some key questions, including: “How does the desire to observe dying bodies potentially damage them?”; and “how do these deteriorating bodies in turn alter the texture of linguistic and visual representation?” The book addresses these questions while helping readers understand and appreciate calligraphy as a “kinetic medium” through which we might “chart the

In Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, presents the first in-depth study of what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, this monograph brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were identified.  Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate histories of both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States. In LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature (LSU Press, 2018), Kirstin L. Squint (Associate Professor of English at High Point University) expands contemporary scholarship on Howe by examining her nuanced portrayal of Choctaw history and culture as modes of expression. Squint shows that Howe’s writings engage with Native, southern, and global networks by probing regional identity, gender power, authenticity, and performance from a distinctly Choctaw perspective—a method of discourse which Howe terms “Choctalking.” Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, Squint complicates prevailing models of the Native South by proposing the co

The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations, which led to the birth of fantasy and science fiction – two of today’s most popular genres. This period also gave rise to a Victorian “crisis of faith,” as the traditional Christian beliefs that had underpinned British society for centuries faced new challenges from scientific discoveries, the writings of Charles Darwin, and exposure to other cultures. In her book Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith (McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2017), Elizabeth M. Sanders argues that these two shifts—one literary and one cultural—were deeply intertwined. She writes that the novel, a literary form that was developed as a vehicle for realism, when infused with unreal elements, offers a space to ponder questions about the supernatural, the difference between belief and knowledge, and huma

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.  How are bodies reproduced, broken apart, and circulated?  And how do the representations of these processes help us understand transnational biopolitics? Heinrich takes up these questions and others in this pathbreaking work, one that will change how readers think about the body in contemporary art and media. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices