New Books in Literary Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books

Arts
1976
Christiane Gruber, “The Praiseworthy One: The P...
Gruber demonstrates that there is long rich history of images of Muhammad from within the Islamic tradition...
60 min
1977
Joseph Rex Young, "George R.R. Martin and the F...
“In the game of thrones you either win or you die."
87 min
1978
Great Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett
“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961),...
65 min
1979
Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, "Southern ...
Picken and Dischinger argue in the introduction that the relationship between the US South and alcohol has been overdetermined in popular imagination...
58 min
1980
Margaret Hillenbrand, "Negative Exposures: Know...
Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know...
58 min
1981
C. Baker and P. Phongpaichit, "From the Fifty J...
The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism...
82 min
1982
Great Books: Amir Eshel on Paul Celan's Poetry
Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism..
55 min
1983
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Parad...
According to Cook, a paradox paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick...
51 min
1984
Great Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "F...
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet...
50 min
1985
Elizabeth A. Wheeler, "HandiLand: The Crippest ...
Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how far American society has progressed toward social justice and how much remains to be done...
56 min
1986
Elizabeth A. Wheeler, "HandiLand: The Crippest ...
Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how far American society has progressed toward social justice and how much remains to be done...
56 min
1987
Jessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Co...
While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s...
51 min
1988
Nicholas R. Jones, "Staging Habla de Negros: Ra...
Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes...
75 min
1989
Andrew Ollett, "Language of the Snakes" (U Cali...
Ollett argues that Prakit is “the most important Indian language you’ve never heard of.”
63 min
1990
Cosmopolitan Printing in a Hybrid Language: A D...
An interview with Tom Hoogervorst
26 min
1991
Great Books: John Callahan on Ellison's "Invisi...
Ellison tells the story of an African-American man who insists on his visibility, agency, and humanity in a country dead-set on not seeing him...
50 min
1992
Melissa Walker and Giselle Roberts, "Women’s Di...
Walker and Roberts discuss the field of documentary editing and how the personal writings of southern women reveal the broader history of life in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
40 min
1993
Carl W. Ernst, “Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr”...
“I am the Real,” is the ecstatic statement often associated with the early Sufi poet Mansur al-Hallaj...
57 min
1994
Andrew Milner, "Again, Dangerous Visions: Essay...
The essays address three substantive areas: the sociology of literature, cultural materialism and the cultural politics of the New Left, and utopian and science fiction studies..,
64 min
1995
Great Books: Hillary Chute on Art Spiegelman's ...
Art Spiegelman's Maus is the story of an American cartoonist's efforts to uncover and record his father's story of survival of the Holocaust...
57 min
1996
Adrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-190...
Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s.
31 min
1997
Great Books: Peter Brooks on Freud's "Civilizat...
You can't always get what you want, Freud noted in his 1930 short book, Civilization and its Discontents...
49 min
1998
D. Gilhooley and F. Toich, "Psychoanalysis, Int...
This book bears witness to what’s possible when the raw pain and heartbreak of life and death are worked with in Psychoanalysis...
54 min
1999
Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, "Chinese Folklore S...
The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded...
70 min
2000
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Bo...
How does the world of book reviews work?
39 min