New Books in Literary Studies

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. 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-foun...

Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context (Routledge, 2021) explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation...

An interview with Natasha Brown, winner of the London Writers Award, and author of Assembly (Little Brown, 2021), the story of a young black British woman, marked by success in education and work, who asks a fundamental question: does my country care whether or I live or die? At a mere one hundred and two pages, Assembly manages to evoke more feeling, more sensorial reality than many novels twice...

Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, Nancy Pedri's A Concise Dictionary of Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions...

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticu...

In this episode Kim and Chad talk about Julia Kristeva’s theory of “intertextuality.” Chad references Chapter 3 of Kristeva’s book Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, (Columbia UP 1980). The last quote (the permanent revolt one) is from Chapter 15, “Europhilia-Europhobia,” of Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt: The P...

In A Vertical Art: On Poetry (Princeton UP, 2022), acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets. Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford...

The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With over 50 contributors like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Nicole Shawan Junior, this resource provides the foundations for crafting a vibrant literary life with the carceral state. The guide offers advice including editing, publishing works, an...

"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Agnon’s act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and t...

In this episode, Kim and Saronik discuss Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” printed in Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. The image for this week is plate three from Jules Morel, Manuel d’Anatomie Artistique. Paris: Grand, 1877. Medical Heritage Library Collections on Internet Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...

Colm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conversation begins with Colm’s latest novel The Magician, about the life of Thomas Mann, and whether we can or should think of novelists as magicians and then moves swiftly from one big question to the next. What are the limitations of the novel as a genre? Wou...

Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism (Northwestern UP, 2018) re-constellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism a...

Many readers know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker? In The Medieval Mind of C. S. Le...

In this episode, Dr. Brandon J. Manning talks about his most recent book, Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire (Rutgers UP, 2022). Here's a short description: through contemporary examples, including the work of Kendrick Lamar, Key and Peele and the presidency of Barack Obama and many others, Played Out: The Race Man in 21st Century Satire examines how Black satirists create vulnerabili...

Today we talk to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon about Wasteland with Words (Reaktion, 2010) and about microhistory as a method. Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wa...

American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage th...

Kim talks with Pardis about Theodor Adorno’s concept of the autonomous work of art, as articulated in his Aesthetic Theory, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment (with help from Max Horkheimer). Pardis Dabashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she specializes in 20th-Century literature and Film studies. Starbucks Christmas Blend is one of her many guilty pl...

“One should really only do philosophy as poetry.” What could Ludwig Wittgenstein have meant by this? What was the context for this odd remark? In Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry (MIT Press, 2021), James Klagge provides a perspective on Wittgenstein as a person and how his life intersected with his work, in particular in the transition from his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to...

For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it? David Maroto, the author of The Artist's Novel: A New Medium (Mousse Publishing, 2020) considers the proliferation of artists writing novels as a sign of the emergence of a new medium. Artists en...

At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Par...

Elizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to...

In this episode Kim and Saronik discuss Bruno Latour’s essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225-248. Image source: M. Platen, The New Curative Treatment of Disease: Handbook of Hygienic Rules of Life, Health Culture, and the Cure of Ailments Without the Aid of Drugs… London : Bong & Co., 1893, p. 668 Learn more a...

Saronik asks Chad about narrators in fiction, and life, who cannot be trusted – their quirks, productive unreliabilities, their effect on present politics, the works! We talk around Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chad Hegelmeyer is a postdoc in English at NYU. His current project is sunbathing while reading Hannah Arendt. The Capybara stands, proudly, in place of Chad. Learn more about...

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, suc...

Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. In The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), historian Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical,...