New Books In Literary Studies

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzes with remarkable nimbleness the interaction of literature, politics, and power in medieval imperial settings. Effortlessly traversing from Buyid Baghdad to Spain and Italy, England shows ways in which literary competition, especially in poetry, pollinated imperial visions and fissures of political sovereignty. Literature and literary duels performed in the space of the imperial court, England convincingly argues, were critical to assemblage of medieval imperial sovereignty. This finely written book will interest and delight scholars of literature, religion, politics, and history-students of Arabic will especially appreciate the copious exhibition of wonderful Arabic poetry throughout the text. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious S

What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), Sami Schalk argues that black women’s speculative fiction changes the rules of literary and textual interpretation by opening up productive spaces of conversation at the intersection of (dis)ability, race and gender. Schalk undertakes a close reading of a variety of genres of speculative fiction including science fiction and neo-slave narratives by authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin. Her book shows the range of black women authors’ exploration and critique of marginalizing social and political structures and their visions for more just, equitable futures. Sami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism. In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Moham

In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality of Indigenous literatures and their ability to help make sense of our world. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) is one-part literary exegesis, one-part memoir, and many parts radical text which calls for, among other things, broader human and non-human kinship, and the use of indigenous literatures to push back against settler colonial forms of erasure and oppression. Justice explores the vibrant universe of over two hundred years of literatures (written and non-written alike), from autobiography to spoken word poetry, to fantasy and wonderworks, in order to make the case that yes, of course indigenous literatures matter; they do so because indigenous people matter. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter thus acts as both indigenous literary bibliography and call to action to peop

Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part of the individual’s personal history, which appears to challenge and collaborate with documented histories. Evolving out of personal memories, The Wall Speaks seeks to illuminate how the individual responds to overwhelming changes that shape and modify not only personal experiences but also collective memories. Although the emphasis is put on specific traumatic events—the core of the narrative constitutes stories of the Polish survivors who lived through World War II—this project reaches to individuals and communities which find themselves in a marginalized condition. The Wall Speaks is about Polish children and teenagers of World War II. It is also about people today who are prohibited from speaking with a voice of their own and are treated as less than fully human.” The personal stories/histories that Sawa

W. G. Sebald, one of the most prominent German-speaking authors of the late 20th century, has been discussed in German literary studies again and again. Nonetheless, many questions about him and his work remain open. In her dissertation Post-Catastrophic Poetics (Post-Katastrophische Poetik [Wilhelm Fink, 2016]), Luisa Banki, postdoc at the University of Wuppertal, challenges common assumptions about Sebald. By putting him in comparison with Walter Benjamin, she argues that Sebald’s narrator is driven by what she calls “paranoia,” which basically means he sees all sorts of connections and meanings in everything whether they are there or not. According to Banki, Sebald’s texts are not only structured by melancholia – as the majority of interpreters claim – but also by this intense, imaginative watchfulness.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though he never enjoyed the publishing success and fame of such friends as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, Lewis Galantière made a considerable contribution to literature over the course of the twentieth century. In Galantière: The Lost Generation’s Forgotten Man (Overlook Press, 2018), Mark I. Lurie describes the life and career of a dedicated man of letters. The precocious son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Galantière’s education was constrained by his family’s impoverished economic circumstances. Yet Galantière benefited from being at the right place at the right time, first in Chicago during the heyday of the “Chicago Renaissance,” then in Paris in the 1920s, where his work as a columnist and translator earned him a place among the expatriate American writers in the city. Returning to America just before the Great Depression, he began a literary partnership with John Houseman that helped start Houseman’s decades-long career in theater. The two reunited during the Second World War at the Office

In Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a contentious figure, especially when it comes to his political activism. In the opinion of many, he did not go far enough in his political work, while others criticize his autobiographical work as euphemistic. Reason enough for Stephan Resch, Senior Lecturer for German Studies at the University of Auckland, to take a deeper look into Stefan Zweig’s work.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Follow-up interviews are always fun. Listen to my follow-up interview with Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018). I talk with her and Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and the co-creator of iZombie and Party Down as well as the author of several young adult novels including Rats Saw God and Slave Day. In this interview we talk about how Schweitzer’s book discusses some of the ways in which Thomas’ series iZombie is ahead of its time, while Thomas shares some of the stories behind co-creating and writing iZombie. In addition, we discuss Thomas’ work on Veronica Mars, how the series came to be, as well as the ways in which it relates to Schweitzer’s new book. It’s a great interview for zombie lovers and marshmallows alike. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is

Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press, 2017) engages fields including physics, phenomenology, native storytelling, and queer temporality. He describes the organization of Beyond Settler Time as “a series of meditations on particular kinds of temporal tensions—ways that Indigenous forms of time push against the imperatives of settler sovereignty” (ix). Exploring a range of sources including film, government documents, fiction, histories, and autobiography, Rifkin considers how time is defined by non-native ideologies.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

​In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Babylonian Talmud, the most studied book in the Jewish canon. Professor Wimpfheimer focuses on one excerpt from the Talmud, showing how its reception, exegesis, and editing represents a process of reflexive critique and legal reasoning. ​A valuable text for scholars and general readers alike, The Talmud: A Biography helps the reader gain new appreciation for the Talmud as a dense tapestry of religious thought, philosophy, law, and ethics that continues to influence not only the Jewish religion, but religious and secular cultures and institutions worldwide. David Gottlieb will receive his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in June.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it. The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a co

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) examines how accusations of harm are appropriated and deployed by powerful people, groups, and political entities in order to justify extreme punitive measures against marginalized “others.” The book exposes how the powerful capitalize on the language of abuse and misrepresent normative conflict, expressions of difference, and resistance to abuse, in order to avoid accountability and self-reflexivity. Linking a wide range of contexts, from intimate relationships to rapports between nation-states, Schulman highlights how negative in-group dynamics—organized around practices of group shunning, refusal of self-examination, and false loyalty that rejects accountability to others—become the “centerpiece of most social injustice”. Conflict is Not Abuse calls for us to interrupt and seek alternatives to escalation and violence by embracing mutual accountability and a sense of communit

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology, published in 2018 by Athabasca University Press. In this unique and penetrating analysis, McCutcheon argues that Shelley’s 1818 novel essentially reinvented the word “technology” for the modern age, establishing its connections with ominous notions of manmade monstrosity. In the twentieth century, this monstrous, Frankensteinian conception of technology was globalized and popularized largely through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and its numerous, diverse adaptations in Canadian popular culture. The Medium is the Monster establishes Frankenstein, and its various adaptations, as the originating intertext for a modern conceptualisation of technology that has manifested with a unique potency in Canadian pop culture, informing w

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the par

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices underwent during the 1920s-1950s. For his most recent book, Pablo Piccato investigated spaces, actors, and fictions that shaped the complicated relationship between crime, justice, and truth during the consolidation of the post-revolution Mexican state. Through a series of compelling arguments, the author shows how impunity, the lack of transparency in judicial processes, and infamy are related to a constant quest for truth and justice that the state could not provide to Mexicans.  From the abolition of the jury system in the 20s, to the emergence of crime fiction, the author shows that men and women, the press, detectives, policemen, and even murderers themselves, shaped both ideas and practices in regards to violence, law-breaking, and the normalization of injustice in the country. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professo

In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need of cheap labor, and it found it in places like Turkey. Although it was assumed that these ‘guests’ would later on move back to their home countries, they unexpectedly often stayed in Germany, founded families and became Germans. In her new book Women Between Strange Cities (Interkulturelle Stadtnomadinnen: Inszenierungen weiblicher Flanerie- und Migrationserfahrung in der deutsch-türkischen und türkischen Gegenwartsliteratur am Beispiel von Aysel Özakın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Aslı Erdoğan [Königshausen & Neumann, 2017]), Jannica Budde, a postdoc at Paderborn University, analyzes German-Turkish as well as Turkish contemporary literature thus shedding some light on the German-Tukish-cultural relationship. Reading works from Aysel Özakın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Aslı Erdoğan, she places particular em

What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of discourse on the probable fate of New York City since the Second World War. The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) traces this “spatial narrative” across many domains of thought and cultural production: fiction and essays, planning theory and practice, humanistic and social-scientific criticism in the public square, and film in the age of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. Throughout, Tochterman shows that New York intellectuals of diverse political inflections have made specters of urban “ungovernability” central to how America and the world look at New York—whether to compel remedies, to render the city’s very chaos alluring, or, especially, to argue for the futility of intervention. Tochterman sheds new ligh

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was erased by intellectuals until black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Hazel Carby undertook the crucial work of recuperating Harper’s writings and highlighting her important contributions to African American literature and history. Koritha Mitchell’s new critical edition of the book–Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted (Broadview Editions, 2018)—makes a timely contribution to the study of black literary and political history by contextualizing Harper’s life and work. In our contemporary moment where black women spearhead international movements for justice and equality such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, but continue to be erased from public discourse and recognition, Mitchell’s foregrounding of Watkins Harper makes a crucial intervention in r

Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering how race and national identity intersect in postcolonial France. Emphasizing a widespread “institutionalized spectacularism” in France that exceeds the display of racialized bodies in more explicit, state-produced and orchestrated spectacle, Knox’s analysis emphasizes a more pervasive gaze permeating contemporary French culture. Moving from a discussion of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 to the analysis of more contemporary cultural forms, the book is a study of race that looks at a range of sources and varieties of performance. Thinking carefully through the persistent French engagement with and mobilization of ideas about race, Knox’s chapters explore official historical discourse, rhetoric and new media, cultural marketplaces, and the field of French and Francophone studies itself. The analysis throughout inc