New Books in Literary Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
2451
Barry Wimpfheimer, “The Talmud: A Biography” (P...
In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Babylonian Talmud,
52 min
2452
Erin Edwards, “The Modernist Corpse: Posthumani...
At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing.
45 min
2453
Sarah Schulman, “Conflict is Not Abuse: Oversta...
Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) examines how accusations of harm are appropriated and deployed by powerful people, groups,
60 min
2454
Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster:...
What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenst...
77 min
2455
Mira Beth Wasserman, “Jews, Gentiles, and Other...
In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s most scandalous tractate,
43 min
2456
Pablo Piccato, “A History of Infamy: Crime, Tru...
A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices underwent during the 1920s-1950s. For his most recent book,
68 min
2457
Jannica Budde, “Turkish Women Writers in German...
In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need of cheap labor,
19 min
2458
Brian Tochterman, “The Dying City: Postwar New ...
What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of disco...
63 min
2459
Koritha Mitchell, ed., “Iola Leroy Or, Shadows ...
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was eras...
43 min
2460
Katelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- an...
Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering how race and national identity intersect in postcolonial ...
56 min
2461
Emily Petermann, “The Musical Novel: Imitation ...
The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (Camden House, 2014; a new paperback edition has recently come out (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)) examines a variety of music and literature interconnect...
0 min
2462
Marcel Schmid, “Autopoiesis and Literature: The...
In his new book Autopoiesis and Literature: The Short History of an Endless Process (Autopoiesis und Literatur: Die kurze Geschichte eines endlosen Verfahrens [transcript, 2016]), Marcel Schmid, a visiting postdoc at the German Department of Brown Univ...
25 min
2463
Nick Admussen, “Recite and Refuse: Contemporary...
Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetry within the unique political and cultural context of C...
61 min
2464
Lana Lin, “Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: ...
In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times.
45 min
2465
Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology a...
The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). In her book, Man,
20 min
2466
Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chel...
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Ce...
30 min
2467
Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competi...
The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name.
30 min
2468
Mehammed Mack, “Sexagon: Muslims, France, and t...
In the recent past, anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have surged across America and Europe. Much of this public discourse revolves around questions of assimilation and where Muslim positions on sexuality and gender fit into national unity.
78 min
2469
Kerry Wallach, “Passing Illusions: Jewish Visib...
What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, explores these questions in her new book,
39 min
2470
Christopher B. Patterson, “Transitive Cultures:...
Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal di...
46 min
2471
Till Nitschmann, “Theater of the Maimed” (Konig...
In his new book Theater of the Maimed: Fictional Characters between Deformation und Destruction in Theatrical Works of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries (Knigshausen and Neumann, 2015) (Theater der Versehrten: Kunstfiguren zwischen Deforma...
13 min
2472
Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (U...
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literat...
77 min
2473
Hoda Yousef, “Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing...
Literacy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take on it, portraying it as a tool.
34 min
2474
Reiko Ohnuma, “Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in ...
Reiko Ohnuma‘s Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful treatment of animals in Indian Buddhist literature. Although they are lower than humans in the paths of rebirth,
52 min
2475
Robert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The...
Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the French border. Many years,
59 min