New Books in Literary Studies

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive - and happier.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced.With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe-at least fleetingly-that anything could happen. These stories will stay with you.Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023), a collection of thirteen spooky literary stories. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. She has been a resident at Hewn oaks Artist Residency and won a 2020 Maine Literary Award in the short works category. She loves cats, the ocean, and ghost stories.Recommended Books: NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, Chain Gang All-Stars Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow 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

Why did the New York Public Library ban a novel about women’s independence? What was the Human Potential Movement? And who was Claire Myers Owens?Today’s book is: Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse University Press,, 2019) by Miriam Kalman Friedman, which is a biography of Owens, who grew up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, but sought adventure and freedom. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its “risqué” content. Drawn to ideals of self-actualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, and published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three. Dr. Friedman’s rediscovery of Owens brings attention to her little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Dr. Friedman chronicles Owens’s robust intellect and her tumultuous private life.Our guest is: Dr. Miriam Kalman Friedman, who is a writing coach, editor, and lecturer. She has published multiple books on feminism, women, and women's studies. She is the author of Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also be interested in: Exploring the Emotional Arc of Turning a Dissertation into A Book Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd This discussion of the book Becoming the Writer You Already Are Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us here to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation.In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super sad, and kind of terrifying, but an economical explanation of plot. She also discusses Max Ophüls’s 1953 film, The Earrings of Madame de... as an example of a film with a potentially liberatory plot. We recommend you watch the latter, not the former. Other texts referenced in this episode include Mary Anne Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Harvard, 2002) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) and Female Complaint (Duke, 2008).The occasion for our conversation was Pardis’s new book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (U Chicago Press, 2023). If you’d like to get yourself a copy there’s a 30% discount on the University of Chicago Press website with the promo code UCPNEW. It’s a book about film and literary modernism, including the work of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. The cover is really beautiful, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in either of the genres it addresses.Pardis Dabashi is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program (MECANA). She has published everywhere, and is friends with everyone! She teaches courses in twentieth-century literature, film studies, Middle East studies, and theory. She was also one of the first guests on High Theory! You can listen to her 2020 episode on The Autonomous Work of Art if you’re feeling a flashback.The image for this episode is a publicity still from George Cukor’s 1936 MGM film Camille, showing Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in a tense embrace. Digital image from Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan’s internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with French Rococo style. In Japan Alice is everywhere—in manga, literature, fine art, live-action film and television shows, anime, video games, clothing, restaurants, and household goods consumed by people of all ages and genders. In Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (U Hawaii Press, 2023), Amanda Kennell traverses the breadth of Alice’s Japanese media environment, starting in 1899 and continuing through 60s psychedelia and 70s intellectual fads to the present, showing how a set of nineteenth-century British children’s books became a vital element in Japanese popular culture. Using Japan’s myriad adaptations to investigate how this modern media landscape developed, Kennell reveals how Alice connects different fields of cultural production and builds cohesion out of otherwise disparate media, artists, and consumers. The first sustained examination of Japanese Alice adaptations, her work probes the meaning of Alice in Wonderland as it was adapted by a cast of characters that includes the “father of the Japanese short story,” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; the renowned pop artist Yayoi Kusama; and the best-selling manga collective CLAMP. While some may deride adaptive activities as mere copying, the form Alice takes in Japan today clearly reflects domestic considerations and creativity, not the desire to imitate. By engaging with studies of adaptation, literature, film, media, and popular culture, Kennell uses Japan’s proliferation of Alices to explore both Alice and the Japanese media environment.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later--long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out--the long shadow of Dylan's trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he's managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan's past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.Then a groundbreaking new law--the Child Victims Act--opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice--does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers' apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.By turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz's debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma--and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School.Recommended Books: Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge 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

Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury), Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films - and likewise his philosophy of photography, culture, semiotics, ethics and theatricality have been immensely important in film theory.Focusing particularly on the essays 'The Third Meaning' and 'On Leaving the Cinema' and the acclaimed book Camera Lucida, Ffrench examines Barthes' writing and traces a persistent interest in films and directors, from Fellini and Antonioni, to Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers and Hitchcock. Ffrench explains that although Barthes found pleasure in "leaving the cinema" - disconnecting from its dangerous allure by a literal exit or by forcefully breaking the trance - he found value in returning to the screen anew. Barthes delved beneath the pull of progressing narrative and the moving image by becoming attentive to space and material aesthetics. This book presents an invaluable reassessment of one of the most original and subtle thinkers of the twentieth-century: a figure indebted to the movies.Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired lecturer in Film Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Are the canonical Gospels historically reliable? The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources. Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical Gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day.In Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2019), Keener explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the Gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the life and ministry of Jesus. Keener’s Christobiography has far-reaching implications for the study of the canonical Gospels and historical Jesus research. He concludes that the four canonical Gospels are historically reliable ancient biographies.Dr. Craig Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 30 books, 6 of which have won awards in Christianity Today. Keener is also the New Testament editor for the award-winning NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, and is serving as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. With more than a million copies of his books in circulation, Keener also serves the global church by teaching and lecturing all over the world.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and artists to develop a theory of refugee aesthetics as a way of considering how aesthetic forms are created and contested by refugees, nonrefugees, and institutions alike.On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Timothy K. August discusses the contradictions in how refugee stories are read as arising from exceptional circumstances even as the ever-increasing number of refugees renders refugeeness a remarkably everyday experience; the importance of aesthetics as a means by which refugees are able to contest—and reimagine—the refugee narratives that have been created through institutional and bureaucratic definitions of refugees; how refugee writers reconcile demands that they explain their experiences or perform their humanity within their own art and writing; and more.The Refugee Aesthetic examines a range of literary and artistic works by refugees, including poems, novels, graphic novels, and visual art, by writers and artists including Bao Phi, Monique Truong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Mohsin Hamid, Gia-Bao Tran, and more, to argue for the agency of refugees as cultural producers who are redefining a politically, bureaucratically produced refugee image and instead imagining a plural form of refugee aesthetics.Please note that this episode was recorded prior to the events of October 7, 2023.Timothy August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and researcher based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attempted to solve this problem; what struggles plagued their solutions; and why our modern, pluralistic landscape makes their work more valuable than ever.Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Kirsten Hall HerlinFeatured Scholars:  Walter Jackson Bate (1918-1999), Professor of English, Harvard University Matt Bucher, Managing Editor, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University D. T. Max, Staff Writer, The New Yorker Special thanks: Dutton KearneyFor transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies