New Books in Literature 83* Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz on Zadie Smith
John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s terrific 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith , so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.
Discussed in this episode:
- Tony Judt, Postwar
- Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
- Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
- Doris Lessing The Fifth Child
- Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means
- Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel
- Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)
- Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
- J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom
- Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”
- Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost
Listen to the episode here:
You can read the transcript here:
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.
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