New Books in Literary Studies

Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary...

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Northwestern UP, 2022) explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the commo...

Part 2 addresses the play's central questions about comedy, tragedy, and passion by examining its language and plot motifs. Professor Tiffany Stern will guide you through the play’s sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, but always honest exploration of love — where it comes from and why it doesn’t always make sense. You’ll also discover how A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects the way that Shakespeare...

In this interview Mary M. McGlynn, Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, discusses her new book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2022). While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging a...

Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on expe...

Despite initiatives to 'diversify' the publishing sector, there has been almost no transformation to the historic racial inequality that defines the field. White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that contemporary book culture is structured by practice that operates according to a White taste logic. By applying the notion of this logic to an analysi...

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across...

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative litera...

Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, fi...

In Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023), Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found...

Today I talked to Mark Staff Brandl about his new book A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023). Brandl is an artist and art historian with a PhD from the University of Zurich. He is an Associate Professor of Art History Emeritus at the Art Academy of Liechtenstein and Higher Professional College for Art in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His work has been shown in galleries...

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, tho...

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred (Lever P...

Life on Grub Street can be challenging, but it’s not without attendant attractions. One of those is the potential to have a platform to tell the unbidden truth. As the prolific D. J. Taylor writes in the introduction to his new collection of essays and reviews, “One of the heartening features of the literary landscape . . . is how tenaciously the freelance reviewer endures and how regularly, in an...

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints th...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedies. At the same time, it’s a play that explores the darker and more dangerous side of love. Four young lovers flee into the forest where their romantic entanglements become even more entangled thanks to the magic of the fairy king, Oberon — who also puts a spell on his wife, Titania, so she falls in love with Bottom, a m...

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the commu...

Yoshiko Okuyama's book Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) defines tōjisha manga as Japan’s autobiographical comics in which the author recounts the experience of a mental or neurological condition in a unique medium of text and image. Yoshiko Okuyama argues that tōjisha manga illuminate otherwise “faceless” individuals and humanize their in...

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers r...

In this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of langu...

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel,...

George Orwell was born in India and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. Douglas Kerr's book Orwell and Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of his writing about the East and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognized, in shaping the writer...

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. In bringing together research into the underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the...

This conversation is with Brett Wilson, who has composed the first English translation of the classic and controversial novel from late Ottoman Turkey Nur Baba--a classic of modern Turkish literature written by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu--offers a unique window into Sufi lodges, social dilemmas, and intellectual life in early twentieth-century Istanbul. Wilson’s tranlsation is both lyrical and capt...

In Part 3, Professor Michael Dobson offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important speeches, including Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination and the rival speeches given by Brutus and Antony to “Friends, Romans, countrymen” at Caesar’s funeral — speeches that display the potential power of rhetoric. Speeches and Performers: Brutus, 2.1, “It must be by his death …” (Anton Le...