New Books In Literary Studies

In Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022), Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Lorena Cuya Gavilano about her interesting new book Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia published in 2021 by the Ohio State University Press. This book analyses the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a critical exploration of the affects and epistemologies of migration in Peru and Bolivia through cultural productions such as films, novels, and short stories in the context of regional neoliberal re-arrangements. Dr. Cuya Gavilano is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultures at Arizona State University. Her areas of specialization are migration studies, film analysis, contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, and Human Geography. Kenneth Sánchez is a Peruvian journalist that works as a freelance journalist and as a multi-platform content curator for the Peruvian media outle

An interview with novelist Grant Ginder. In his latest dramady of familial disfunction, Let’s Not Do That Again (Henry Holt, 2022), Grant starts with political intrigue that bridges New York and Paris, mixes it with a wealthy and connected family in freefall, and ties it together with a transnational criminal coverup. The result is one of the most engrossing novels of the year. Grant’s work reminds us why the novel form can be both beautiful and ribald, literary and popular. I had such a wonderful time talking to Grant about how families inevitably disappoint, and how great writers can show how they manage to love each other despite themselves. Grant Recommends: Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind Jennifer Close, Marrying the Ketchups Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under c

In this episode, co-translators Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan discuss their Korean-to-English translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Released as part of The Pride List from The University of Chicago Press, Glory Hole is a fantastical collection of queer poems that are uncomfortable, bodily, fluid-filled, and delightfully puzzling to read. Across fifty-one bewildering poems, Kim both engages and confuses readers with puns, distorted retellings of American popular culture, dystopian landscapes, robots, and more, all to a relentlessly queer backdrop of longing and sexual desire. Tune in to hear Suhyun and Archana read some of their favorite translations from this collection, talk about their own journeys to translation and translating Glory Hole, and share the challenges and joys of bringing this work into the English language: the Korean wordplay that they reimagine in English; their collaborative process of making sense of these poems in both Korean and English; some favorite (and mo

Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair. (Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!) Reading List: GPT3 Creativity When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo? Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Machine Music and Art Google Magenta Creating Image from Text Dall-E, Creative Text Generation Bias in Language Models Stereoset measures Racism, Sexism, and other Forms of Bias in AI Language Models, Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, The Woman worked as a Babysitter, Timnit Gebru’s thread about Google firing her, RealToxicityPrompts, Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models Bias in Poetry Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System AI Poetry Google’s New AI Help

Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies. Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2011), and Janice Radway’s books, Reading the Romance (UNC Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books (UNC Press, 1997). Chad quotes several texts referenced by Rosen: Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 2005) Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1982) Mark McGurl. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–349. In the longer version of our conversation, Chad gave several other examples of the “institutional

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How the Common got started What is involved in running a literary journal Why grants and institutional support matter so much in the literary arts The importance of finding mentors and building a network How the Common creates community Our guest is: Jennifer Acker , who is the founder and editor in chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in Oprah Daily, Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, and The Yale Review, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband. Our guest is: Elizabeth Witte, who is a writer and editor based in western Massachuset

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration. He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporting

In Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021), Cambridge professor Stanley Bill offers a profoundly original, fine-grained, and rich interpretation of the poetic œuvre of Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. The book presents Miłosz’s poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish poet saw the reductive “biologization” of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. Stanley Bill argues that Miłosz’s response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. For Miłosz, the double nature of p

Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin (Peter Lang, 2022), the first book in the new series “Imagining Black Europe,” explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneous and malleable, which constitutes its strengths and, at the same time, creates tensions. Anna von Rath traces the theoretical beginnings of Afropolitanism and moves on to explore Afropolitan practices in London and Berlin. Afropolitanism can take different forms, such as that of an identity, a political and ethical stance, a dead–end road, networks, a collective self–care practice or a strategic label. While not a unitary project, the vast variety of Afropolitan practices provide approaches to contemporary political problems in Europe and beyond. In this book, Afropolitan practices are read against the specific cont

Marta Puxan-Oliva’s Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel (Routledge, 2021), engages with the intertwined relationship between narrative studies – centering on narrative reliability – racial conflicts and ideologies. Puxan-Oliva argues that the problem of narrative reliability in fiction, often mirrors and makes use of narrative reliability of historical discourse, and therefore urges literary critics to examine the historical context of a work of fiction to “comprehend technical modulations of narrative reliability.”  Her book offers a crucial contribution to narrative theory by insisting on a need to historicize the field itself to understand how historical discourses give rise to specific cultural and political discourses. In order to illustrate her methodology, Puxan-Oliva analyzes Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Albert Camus’s L’étranger, and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de est

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence (UP of Mississippi, 2021) explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective,

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith. The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (Princeton UP, 2022) takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relat

Saronik talks with Manish Melwani about outdated visions of the future and stale science fiction ideas that just won’t die. Manish is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake. (That’s where he met Saronik.) Manish has published several short stories, with several more—and a novel—on the way. They talk about science fiction’s imperialist heritage and how going to Mars is just a distraction from the imaginative (and literal) dead end our civilization faces. They also throw shade on Cecil Rhodes and certain tech moguls who have completely missed the point of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Manish’s perspective has been shaped by many other writers and theorists including: John Rieder’s work on Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s seminal essays, Alec N

Gregory M. Clines' book Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation (Routledge, 2022) traces how and why Jain authors at different points in history rewrote the story of Rāma and situates these texts within larger frameworks of South Asian religious history and literature. Clines' book is a valuable contribution to the fields of Jain studies and religion and literature in premodern South Asia. It is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.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

In Underdevelopment and African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Sarah Brouillette tackles the print culture and literature in English in South and East Africa. Starting from the period of the 1970s to the contemporary times. She analyses literary texts as well as textbooks and books written for the learners of the English language. She puts forth how piracy, short-fictions app, apps and so on form an intricate part of this diverse field. Sarah Brouillette is a professor at Carleton University in Canada. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press, 2022) by Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender. Dr. Marlon B. Ross is professor of English at the Unive

Kim talks with Sonya Posmentier about hurricanes. Sonya writes about hurricanes and diaspora in her book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. In the episode she references Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “The History of the Voice” and Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence, Harvard University Press, 2011. She also talks about a genre of Jamaican dancehall music that grew in the wake of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. To hear some of that music and learn more about the musical resonances of hurricanes, you can read her “Hurricane Season Playlist” on the Johns Hopkins University Press blog. Sonya teaches African American literature in the English Department at New York University (where she is an excellent dissertation advisor for literary scholars and future podcasters). This week’s image of a spiral evoking hurricane wind patterns was borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Creative commons license, CC By Share Alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me

On this episode of New Books in Performing Arts, we talk with Andy Bragen about two plays of his published in a new volume by Northwestern University Press: This is My Office and Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays center on grief: Bragen's process of grieving his father in This is My Office and the slow, painful process of his mother's death in Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays are bravely emotionally bare yet unsentimental. They situate death and dying in a long continuum that both predates and antedates the individual person. In this way, both plays are as much about family, history, and family history as much as they are about the moment of death.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An interview with Fernanda Melchor, finalist for the International Booker Prize, and author most recently of Paradais (New Directions, 2022). And Sophie Hughes, the English translator of Fernanda’s two novels, and winner of the Pen Translates Award. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon the ways in which translation is akin to friendship, and how a translation can be the greatest interpretation of your work. Fernanda discusses her understanding of violence as inseparable from the story of humanity, and how she sees her style as that which persists after she has let go of the text, while Sophie addresses the question of the translator’s invisibility and the lexicons required for each new writer's work that she takes on. This episode features a bilingual reading from Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. It is not to be missed. Books Recommended in this episode: Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo José Agustín, De Perfil Nona Fernandez, The Twilight Zone Marianna Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Alia Trabucc