New Books in Literary Studies

In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her daughter were discovered by slave catchers. Rather than have her return to slavery, Garner killed her child. In Beloved, Morrison’s character Sethe has a similar story, but years later she meets a young girl who is the incarnation of the daughter she had killed. When Beloved came out, it immediately became Morrison’s most acclaimed work. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved examines community, motherhood, identity, slavery, freedom, and our relationship to the past. Amy Hungerford is the Vice President for Arts and Sciences as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She is a professor of English and the author of Making Literature Now and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, personal ambivalences, and the reality of sci-fi as a problematic genre. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the book shows how race, age, and gender all play a role in the way feminist women interpret some of the biggest sci-fi franchises, as well as how they think about iconic characters. Crucially the analysis foregrounds the agency of feminist women sci-fi fans, demonstrating how they are challenging and changing the genre and its fan community for the better. Theoretically and empirically rich and deep, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in fandom!Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Lydia Millet about her new novel Dinosaurs (Norton, 2022).Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.Recommendations: Dan Flores, American Serengeti Dan Flores, Wild New World 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 contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Erin is a former Research Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at the University of London, and is the recipient of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hancock Award for a distinguished article on the poet.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic geniuses Homer and Virgil, he wanted to surpass them. Decades later, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, reworking and embellishing the stories of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise and Satan’s fall from heaven to create what is unquestionably the greatest epic poem written in English. Erik Gray is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include The Art of Love Poetry, Milton and the Victorians, and The Poetry of Indifference: from the Romantics to the Rubáiyát. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste!Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words."The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing."Mentioned in this episode: "Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine "Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth. Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964. Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016 Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883. Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985. Listen to the episode hereRead the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history.Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history.Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies