New Books in Literary Studies

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, an Assistant Professor of English at Rice University, delves into the complexities of identity in Indian English literature. With her book, she challenges how ethnic and postcolonial labels affect the representation of writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. Srinivasan introduces the concept of 'accented reading,' highlighting how accents shape listener perceptions. She emphasizes the need for literature to push back against political hostility while exploring the legacies of influential theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said.

In this engaging discussion, Urmila Seshagiri, a distinguished humanities professor and Virginia Woolf expert, reveals her exciting discovery of a revised typescript for Woolf's early stories about a giantess named Violet. They explore how these whimsical tales blend fantasy and satire while defying social norms and marriage plots. Urmila highlights the significant friendship between Woolf and Violet Dickinson, showcasing how this bond influenced Woolf's literary journey. The topics spark insights into women's creativity and social dynamics, shedding new light on Woolf’s groundbreaking themes.

Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Litwin Books, 2025) sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. In Ways of Knowing, Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara present unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in libraries. The oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered. The set of oral histories included in the volume document the Chicano Thesaurus, A Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. Drabinski and Belantara recorded hour-long oral histories with two representatives from each project, documenting the origins of each thesaurus, the political and social context from which they emerged, and the processes involved in their development and implementation. Introductory essays provide a context for each thesaurus in the history of information and activism in libraries. The book and accompanying digital files constitute the first primary source of its kind and a unique contribution to the history of metadata work in libraries. Capturing these stories through sound recording offers new ways of understanding the field of critical cataloging and classification as we hear the joy, frustration, urgency, and seriousness of critical metadata work. Find the Ways of Knowing project online at https://waysofknowing.org/. This interview also makes reference to Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, available open access from MIT Press. Amanda mentioned her online exhibit about the Chicano Studies Library, available at https://bibliopolitica.org/. Amanda Belantara is Assistant Curator at New York University Libraries. Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor and librarian at the City University of New York. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.John's interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask about about the sliding meanings of comedy and its pachinko machine capacity; he loves the way Ben uses the word and concept of doubling,; Ben explains how the computer may either queer (in an antisocial way) or get assimilated into romantic heteronormative pairings. John asks about Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto and teh way it denaturalizes gender roles and the way new technological affordances (from the Acheulean axe that Malafouris discusses to the Apple watch) redefine human roles. Ben delves into the minstrelsy pre-history of the photo-robots going as far back as the late 19th century. They unpack the distinctively American Leo Marxian optimism of The Machine in the Garden (1964) that spreads back as far as the proto-robots like The Steam Man of the Prairies(1868) and good old Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz novels. John asks about double-edged nature of Ben’s claim that comic “genericity provides forms for making a computationally mediated social world seem more habitable, even as it also provides Is for criticizing and objecting to that world." First you get description says Ben--and then sometimes critique. John asks about the iterability of the new: how much of what seems new actually New New (in the sense of that great 1999 Michael Lewis book, The New New Thing)? Mentioned in the episode: The Desk Set a play William Marchand and a movie starring Katherine Hepburn. How might a computer be incorporated into the sociability of a couple? Her (Spike Jonze,, 2013) computer meets human makes the rom-com into a coupling machine. WarGames (1983( ends with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy (not Ione Skye—silly John!) paired. But also with Broderick and the formerly deadly computer settling down to “how about a nice game of chess”? Black Mirror as the 2020’s version of the same dark satire as the 1950’s Twilight Zone. John asks about Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad, and the comic coupling of Kirk and Spock and the death-as-computer comedy of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964). Dave Eggers: the joke structure as critique in The Circle and The Every. John Saybrook wrote in the New Yorker about an eye-opening conversation with Bill Gates in 1994. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's Seven Beauties of Science Fiction on the “fictionalization of everyday life" Recallable Books: Elif Batuman The Idiot (2017) Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (2000) Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends (2017) Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore “The Sandman”—a tale that haunted Freud enough to spark his famous psychoanalytic analysis of “The Uncanny,” examining familiar things that unsettle and disturb us for no clear reason. What makes this bizarre story so deeply disturbing, even today? And how does Hoffmann’s genius, in all of his writing, continue to shape the way we think about the unfamiliar, and the blurry line between human and machine? Our guest for this show is New York-born Peter Wortsman, a renowned translator of Kafka, Kleist, Musil and others, playwright, and author, whose travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin won the Independent Publishers Book Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Eleanor Fitzsimons, a biographer and researcher focused on women's voices, discusses her work co-editing 'Speranza: Poems by Jane Wilde.' She delves into Jane Wilde's significant role in the 1840s Young Ireland movement and her advocacy for women's rights and education. The conversation highlights the themes of hardship in her poetry, particularly around famine and migration, and explores her evolution as a nationalist. Fitzsimons also shares insights on the contemporary reception of Wilde’s work and her enduring legacy as a poet and activist.

The structural and symbolic purposes of ruins in literary texts have a long history, yet few scholars explore their importance within J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. From the ruins of Erebor and the relics of Gondolin appearing in The Hobbit to the various images of Amon Sûl, Moria, and Osgiliath in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien constructs a distinct mood-one that captures characters' awareness of the glories of the past and a desire to emulate them. The scholars who do engage Tolkien's relics and ruins tend to limit the scope to Tolkien's debt to the Middle Ages. While such scholarship begins important conversations, the full story of Tolkien's relics and ruins is left untold. Tolkien's Medievalism in Ruins: The Function of Relics and Ruins in Middle-earth (Bloomsbury, 2025) takes corrective action and expands this historical and critical literary scope. This collection seeks to promote a more comprehensive approach to Tolkien's legendarium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan's life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other. The book frames Lacan's thought in the history of philosophy and explains it through jokes, films, and popular culture. In this light, Lacan becomes a thinker of philosophical importance in his own right, on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lacan's great contribution is the introduction of the unconscious into subjectivity, which results in a challenge to both the psychoanalytic establishment and to philosophers. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan provides readers with a way of understanding the nature of Lacan's contribution. Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch not only changed the lives of nineteenth-century blind people, but also challenged longstanding perceptions about blindness and reading. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of blind people learned how to read by touch. Using fiction, essays, letters, and speeches authored by blind readers, By Touch Alone traces the ways in which literacy changed blind people's experiences of education, leisure, spirituality, and social engagement. Analyzing records of activism and innovation as well as frustration, this study documents the development of an inkless book culture shaped by blind readers’ preferences and needs. While By Touch Alone features the writing and ideas of an understudied community of nineteenth-century blind authors, innovators, and activists, it also engages the work of sighted authors such as George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling to explore the culture-wide effects of reading by touch. The emergence of a new category of readers who did not rely on sight to read prompted sighted people to reimagine blindness and adopt more progressive attitudes toward blind people. In our own era, one characterized by the increasing digitization of our reading lives, Vanessa Warne’s exploration positions scholars and blind readers to navigate present-day developments and shape the future of their reading lives. A carefully contextualized study of how reading by touch shaped Victorian culture, By Touch Alone adds new chapters to the history of disability and reading. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Carol Atack, a Fellow at Cambridge and expert in Greek philosophy, delves into Plato's life and its impacts on his philosophical ideas. She discusses how the turbulence of 5th-century Athens shaped his thought, from his critique of democracy triggered by events like Socrates' trial to the significance of the Herculaneum papyrus discoveries. Atack also highlights Plato's travels and interactions with other thinkers, examining how these experiences influenced his Academy and its legacy in shaping modern education. Plato's relevance in today's political climate is also a key topic.