New Books In Literary Studies

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women’s rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton UP, 2020) restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today. The book’s format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as “Painting,” “Music,” “Memory,” “Property and Appearance,” and “Rank and Luxury,” Tomaselli

In The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021), Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Before Farah Jasmine Griffin’s father died, he wrote to her a note ending with a line “read until you understand.” He would die years later when she was nine, and that line has guided her literary curiosity. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (Norton, 2021), Griffin shares the indispensable lessons of Black wisdom that rooted her from the searing rhetoric of David Walker and Frederick Douglass to compelling Black prose of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, to the Black soul sounds of Gladys Knight and the Pips and Marvin Gaye. Weaving memoir, history, and culture, Griffin explores the themes such as mercy, love, death, beauty, and grace to help readers wrestle with the continuing struggle for freedom and American democracy. N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supp

Home Press is a tiny local publishing house and press in Tel Aviv Jaffa. Uri Yoeli and Nana Ariel, a couple, established it in their apartment in 2019. The Home Press booklets are thin, hand-sewn with needle and thread, printed in small, numbered editions, and as opposed to bibliophilic books - cheaply produced and sold. They vary from prose and poetry to history and artist books. Home Press is an independent venture, inspired by the history of self publishing, but not nostalgic. It is a local, ecological home for books, largely detached from the book market, fueled by love for words, books and people. Nana Ariel is a writer, a researcher and a teacher. She teaches rhetoric at Tel Aviv University, formerly a visiting scholar at Harvard University. She published articles in international magazines, and is the author of books in Hebrew, including: “Manifestos: Restless Writing on the Brink of the 21st Century”, and the children’s book “The Most Boring Book in the World”. Uri Yoeli is a writer, independent histo

Medieval Kashmir in its golden age saw the development of some of the most sophisticated theories of language, literature, and emotion articulated in the pre-modern world. James D. Reich's book To Savor the Meaning: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in this period by looking at debates about how poetry communicates emotions to its readers, what it is readers do when they savor these emotions, and why this might be valuable.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, 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 this episode, I interview Rachel Zolf—a poet whose “interdisciplinary practice explores questions about history, knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and the limits of language, meaning, and the human”—about their new book, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, published by Duke University Press. In the text (which is both an essay in the etymological sense of an attempt as well as a longform poem, a making), Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen. [No one / bears witness for the / witness.]”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness articulates the Nazi holocaust as part of a constellation of

Sheathing the Bodkin: Combating Suicide is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and poet, author and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht. After intriguing details about how she combines writing poetry, doing scholarly history and public writing, this wide-ranging conversation movingly embellishes upon Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, which is an intellectual and cultural history of the most persuasive arguments against suicide from the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as Albert Camus. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.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

As in colonial situations elsewhere, Korean experiences of Japanese empire featured many attempts by the imperial authorities to regulate intimate aspects of Korean life, including intermarriage between colonizer and colonized peoples. While official messaging and policy promoted Korean-Japanese unions, cultural output including films, short stories and novels from the time also focused on the topic, including works by Korean writers authored in both Korean and Japanese languages. In Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905-1945 (Cornell UP, 2020), Su Yun Kim places the works of several prominent authors alongside official documents and media reports from the time to show how these reflect the political, ethnic, linguistic and of course affective complexities of romantic relations in an imperial setting. This intriguing book offers a revealing window into a lesser-studied dimension of empire at the interpersonal level, shedding light on questions of identity, domination and sentiment ami

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to adv

In Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing (Utah State UP, 2021), William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration.  Our conversation focuses on the processes that remain elusive during a collaborative project (and thus are difficult to teach in a classroom or recognized by the academic ecosystem), the risky accounts that live alongside collaborations, and a few ideas to think about and apply the next time you collaborate.  Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Thomas O. Haakenson's book Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada (Bloomsbury, 2021) focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium mem

In Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), Joy Porter examines the extraordinary life of Frank “Toronto” Prewett and the history of trauma, literary expression, and the power of self-representation after WWI. She sheds new light on how the First World War affected the Canadian poet, and how war-induced trauma or “shell-shock” caused him to pretend to be an indigenous North American. Porter investigates his influence of, and acceptance by, some of the most significant literary figures of the time, including Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. In doing so, Porter skillfully connects a number of historiographies that usually exist in isolation from one another and rarely meet. By bringing together a history of the WWI era, early twentieth century history, Native American history, the history of literature, and the history of class Porter expertly crafts a valuable contribution to the field. Learn more about your ad choi

First Words, Last Words: New Theories for Reading Old Texts in Sixteenth Century India (Oxford UP, 2021) charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea explore this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vednta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. First Words, Last Words traces both the issue of sequence and the question of innovation through an in-depth study of this debate and through a comparative survey of similar problems in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revealing that the disputants in this controversy often pretended to uphold traditional views, when they were in fact radically innovative. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information

The rich and complex prose of the celebrated Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a detailed look at the fabric of European literary and social discourse and continues to attract scholarly attention, even 200 years after his birth. 2021 marks the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth. To commemorate this occasion, join us in conversation with Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, as she takes us through the brief-yet-colourful life, most notable works, and myths surrounding the celebrated Russian author. The discussion is an extension of “The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review”, published by Brill and edited by Prof. Vladiv-Glover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This is the third episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). This episode features two of the winners in Creative Writing Prose: Xuan Juliana Wang, whose collection Home Remedies explores the new generation of Chinese diasporic wanderers, and Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, whose collection The Foley Artist provides a new treatment of queer Filipinx diasporic lives. Xuan Juliana Wang was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her collection Home Remedies won the 2021 AAAS award in Creative Writing: Prose. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is finishing his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, The

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had a deep connection with the port city of Trieste. Writing after World War I, when the contested city joined Italy, these authors resisted the easy nostalgia of the postwar period, radically reimagining the origins of Europe in the Mediterranean culture of the Phoenicians, contrasting a 19th-century nationalist discourse that saw Europe as the heir of a Greek and Roman legacy. These writers saw the Adriatic city, a cosmopolitan bazaar under the Habsburg Empire, as a social laboratory of European integration. Salvatore P

Green River Valley, Robert Lashley's third book of poetry, is a moving and complex tribute to the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. Whether writing about finding love in the aisles of Value Village, the ex drug runner who now feeds pigeons in the park, or the pain of being mocked for expressing emotion at the barber shop, Lashley unites exacting attention to detail with universal themes of trauma and survival. Lashley's Tacoma comes alive in this book like Wilson's Pittsburgh, Borges' Buenos Aires, or Gornick's New York. 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

Despite the proliferation of scientific ecology in the second half of the 20th C emphasizing the interconnection between environment and humanity, Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the intersection of ecology with the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This intellectual/literary history considers altered forms of the American wilderness narrative influenced by the ideas and vocabulary taken from psychoanalysis and various identity-based social movements that emerged in this chaotic moment. By deep reading the works of Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakuer, among others, Dr. Menrisky demonstrates how these authors either dramatized or undermined concepts of ecological authenticity within the identity politics of ecology, or IPE. In this framework, IPE represents a story of oscillation: a back-and-forth between writers attempting to shore up a narrative of ecological authenticity and those willing to q

Volodymyr Vynnychenko is one of the most ambiguous and controversial Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century. In an intricate and highly entangled way, his persona combines an artist and a statesman whose political views include both national aspirations of Ukraine and the pursuit of programs which were marked by socialist and federalist ideas. His writing opens a window into cultural and political contestations that were taking place in Ukraine in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Empire and on the eve of the creation of the Soviet Union. The complexity of these dramatic and drastic changes manifests itself in Vynnychenko’s writing, which is marked by psychological nuances and emotional crevices. George Mihaychuk’s Disharmony and Other Plays (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2020) invites the reader to delve into a psychological world of characters who try to deal with moral doubts, hesitations, and uncertainties. In the introduction, George Mihaychuk outlines the pillars of Vynnychenk

Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputat