New Books in Communications

Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through the complex lens of the question or concept of flattery. The book traces this complicated concept through both many of the “expected” writers and thinkers in the western political theory canon while also integrating some unexpected thinkers. Kapust positions many of these thinkers in encounters with each other—exploring the kinds of conversations these thinkers might have with each other. The encounters between authors and texts tease out the differing understandings of flattery and the way that it can be used in political contexts as well as within the affective webs in which humans live and engage with one another on a personal level. Thus, Kapust situates flattery within politics, provides the reader with different definitions of flattery, and also teases out the differences between flattery and friendship. The book begins by posing the question as to why flattery is a worrisome political phenomenon and concludes with a brief exploration of the contemporary political dynamic in the United States on the eve of the 2016 election. But between these bookends, Kapust takes the reader through an extended exploration of works by Cicero, Smith, Machiavelli, the Federalist, and others who indeed wrestle with the idea of flattery in the public sphere and also within the context of political friendship and personal relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

When you hear “Twentieth Century Fox,” I doubt you know where the source of “Fox” in the name. In her book, The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 2017), Vanda Krefft presents a detailed biography of one of the founders of the American film industry, whose successes are largely unknown because of his ultimate downfall.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) is an anthology of essays from Dorothy Noyes, professor of English and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and president of the American Folklore Society. The collection of essays takes aim at some of the critical questions that the discipline of folklore faces in the twenty-first century. From seminal keyword essays (monsters, she calls them) on group, tradition, and aesthetics that set out the state of the field, to studies of the historical uses of tradition at different moments across Europe, to critiques of present-day slogan-concepts like Intangible Cultural Heritage and resilience, Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) sets out to see how the discipline of folklore, with its emphases on vernacular theorization—as opposed to grand or high theories—provides unique insights into society more broadly. Ultimately, it seems, the strength and weaknesses of folklore might simultaneously lie in the fact that the field and its theories are humble: low and close to the ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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 literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display in the monograph, Neocybernetics and Narrative, out from University of Minnesota Press in 2014. In picking up Niklas Luhmann’s neologism “neocybernetics” in place of a more standard second-order cybernetic label, Clarke carves out a theoretical continuum for his thinking that runs along a trajectory from Heinz von Foerster’s notions of the observer, through George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and right up to, and including, Niklas Luhmann’s controversial extension of autopoiesis theory to metabiotic social systems; a theoretical move most often excluded from more orthodox second-order cybernetic thinking. The formidable theoretical apparatus he has assembled allows Clarke to frame the reader of literary texts as an observer of semantic structures facilitating the psychic construction of possible worlds of meaning, and to examine literary texts themselves as forms of communicative action that continue the autopoiesis of meaning-constituted social systems along the lines of Luhmann’s tripartite process of information, utterance, and understanding. From this launch-pad, Clarke takes us on a stratospheric ride with stops on a variety of fascinating landscapes including the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, the socio-technical explorations of Bruno Latour, and encounters with artistic works as diverse as Virgina Woolf’s iconic modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway and James Cameron’s quasi-Gaian special effects blockbuster motion picture, Avatar. As a result, Clarke has given arts and humanities scholars an entirely new set of tools with which to think about artistic production, reception, and mediation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Shanto Iyengar is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He has written extensively on news media and political communication in contemporary democracy. His most recent book is titled Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide (W. W. Norton, 2015); new edition is forthcoming this year. His current research focuses on political polarization, framing effects, and political affect.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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. Yousef uses reading and writing to interrogate how new social practices were changing Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrating how they were used to further divide or fracture the public sphere. Literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Egyptians all engaged in the written word via different means, be they petition-writers, those who appealed to scribes, or coffee-house frequenters who all gathered to hear a newspaper be read. Ultimately, it was the emergence of this diversely literate population that shaped the Egyptian nation that emerged in the twentieth century. Hoda Yousef is assistant professor at Denison University, previously she served as an assistant professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College. She is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Islamic World with a focus on cultural and social history and gender in society, with degrees from Georgetown and Duke Universities. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring. Whether producing music shows such as Little Blue Flame, game shows like Let’s Go Girls or dramatic mini-series, the creators of Soviet programming in the 1950s through 1970s sought to produce television that was festive. Evans demonstrates that television programmers conducted audience research and audience voting as they attempted to meet Soviet citizens’ expectations and hold their interest. Rather than stagnating, the producers and filmmakers experimented with multiple forms, in particular in presenting the news. In this interview, Christine Evans discusses her thoroughly researched and entertaining study, and what we can learn about Soviet society in the Brezhnev era through the television it created and watched. Christine E. Evans is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Amanda Jeanne Swain is associate director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. She has published articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Amanda can be contacted at amandajswain@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Aidan Smith has written a timely and important analysis of the way that we understand images, masculinity, and femininity, especially through the lens of presidential campaigns and political advertising. Smith’s book, Gender, Heteronormativity, and the American Presidency (Routledge, 2017) explores the idea of heteronormativity within our implicit and explicit conceptions of the American presidency—thus focusing not only on how masculinity is deployed to create particular images of candidates running for office, but also how femininity is used for both first ladies, and for female candidates for the White House who must negotiate an even more complicated set of expectations given our two hundred year history with the occupants of the Oval Office. Smith delves into the complexity of gender performance in presidential politics, and how embedded expectations of patriarchy, fatherhood, manly success, and particular experiences (wartime, boardroom, etc.) all contribute to expectations that are applied to those running for office, especially executive office. This book weaves together analyses and perspectives from a number of fields and disciplines, and thus will be of interest to political scientists who study the presidency and campaigns, as well as political theorists who explore questions of gender performance and sexuality, along with historians and communication experts exploring the integration of televisual images within the American household and the impact of this technological shift. This is a broad study that braids together gender performance expectations, heteronormativity, a nuanced understanding of the presidency, and an analysis of what that position and office often mean to the citizenry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia. In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twenty years of fieldwork in Catalonia. Next, Woolard’s theoretical framework is applied to the case of a popular satirical television program which catalyzed the sociolinguistic rehabilitation of a Catalonian president whose Castilian Spanish was better than his Catalan. Finally, Woolard discusses her early and recent fieldwork in a Catalan-medium high school, and her experiences of following up on research informants first interviewed twenty years ago. This is a typically rich and fascinating volume from a pioneer of linguistic anthropology. Positioned as a corrective against the banal nationalism of mainstream media discourse about Spain and Catalonia, the book calls on us to rethink our ideologies of language, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which have become so polarized in the West in recent years. Kathryn Woolard wrote a post for Indiana University’s Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology blog (08/14/2017) in which she discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here. John Weston is an Yliopistonopettaja (Associate Lecturer) at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at j.weston@qmul.ac.uk.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In his book Reality TV (Routledge, 2017), author Jon Kraszewski explores reality television’s relationship to the American cityscape. Starting with show such as Candid Camera and An American Family, Kraszewski positions reality television in cities where individuals were able to thrive regardless of social class. In this space, early reality television created a laboratory for individuals. Moving to the early 1990s and beyond, Kraszewski challenges the ways in which reality television persisted in this relationship with the city although most viewers do not have the means to live in cities. Using case studies of how the Bravo network exploits the urban servant, the examination of “Boston” Rob Marino and Tiffany “New York” Pollard as reality show representative of major global American cities, and how shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Alaska: The Last Frontier, and Swamp People, Krasweski present the complex and often problematic relationships between American urban space and the way in which reality television uses and exploits that space in relation to their characters. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications