New Books in Literary Studies

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.In this episode, I interview Kas Saghafi, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, about his book The World After the End of the World, published through SUNY Press in 2020. In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of “the end the world” in Derrida’s late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida’s work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida’s thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy’s. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a “spectro-poetics” devoted to and assigned to the other’s singularity.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition.This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specific time-period and invites us to locate the conversation about Kraus, as well as about the modernist discourse, in the context of the present moment.In his book, Linden outlines the most salient features of Kraus’s writing and establishes an ethic and aesthetic matrix to explore the variations and renditions that the modernist projects may promote and welcome. The book specifies Kraus’s aesthetic engagement with satire, as well as with the exploration of the language limitations (if any) and with intellectual conversations, which serve as responses to political and historical events.The latter makes Linden’s project particularly relevant and up-to-date for the contemporary moment: Kraus’s oeuvre helps further disclose how writing can be engaged as a key instrument not only for the construction of the individual’s perception of the self and others, but also for the construction of ideological paradigms, encapsulating power and control on both individual and public levels.Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity brings modernity and modernism to the forefront of the post-postmodernist concerns and offers an insightful perspective on how a writer responds to history and politics while interrupting the discourse with their aesthetic renditions.Ari Linden is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter tells the dramatic story of a woman cast out of society for adultery and condemned to wear a badge of shame in Puritan New England. Renowned psychologist Carol Gilligan identifies Hawthorne’s masterpiece as “the American novel” because (as Hawthorne puts it toward the book’s end) it points to a “new truth [that would place] the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” Gilligan revolutionized our understanding of human development by listening to girls, and showing, in her landmark study, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Human Development, how a “different voice” reveals something about our humanity that is more truthful, more authentic, and more generative for our lives together than the voice that privileges autonomy, identity and separation as moral ideals. Gilligan is the author of many other books, including a novel and the recent Why Does the Patriarchy Persist, and (with David Richards), Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance. She explains how The Scarlet Letter is not only about the wages of sin and tragic love, but also about a vision of democracy that we have yet to realize fully, and about the way feminism is the key to achieving our democracy as it is threatened by the persistence of the patriarchy. Gilligan’s reading lifts Hawthorne’s book above its status as required reading, often assigned as a lesson in morality or a book about the long-gone past, by showing how The Scarlet Letter presents a vision of authentic love and a path to true democracy where equality and justice will be attained.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's 1958 Things Fall Apart transformed the world by vividly imagining the story of an African community in English, the language of the colonizers, and yet on its own terms. It transformed not only the English language but allowed millions of readers to enter into a civilization and worldview that is at once highly specific yet resonant with universal themes. Manthia Diawara, the Mali-born and European and American-educated renowned filmmaker, most recently An Opera of the World, and author of many books himself, including We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, explains why Things Fall Apart ranks among the great novels of all time. Manthia brings the book powerfully to life, and shows how reading this book brings you face-to-face with the great challenges and joys faced by all humans at all times. Read more.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ship Life: Seven Months of Voluntary Slavery (2022) is written in the form of a diary of a Ukrainian girl who worked as a bar server on an American cruise ship. Day after day, the author recreates from memory the real events of the seven months spent on board, sharing her impressions, discoveries, and experiences. Readers of this diary have the opportunity to visit more than 20 countries in Europe, North and Central America with the author, and most importantly - to learn firsthand what it is - ship life.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). In her dissertation on Richard Brautigan, she focuses on postmodernism in American literature. Currently, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian program at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is the oral tradition of Chinese storytelling about and what is the connection to the great Chinese novels?How to translate a Chinese classic such as the famed and defamed “Jin Ping Mei”? And how to handle the dilemma of steering one’s boat between enormous amounts of scholarship on the novel without drowning, and keeping up the tempo of translation day after day?NIAS senior researcher Vibeke Børdahl joined NIAS Press Student Assistant, Julia Heinle, to discuss her upcoming publications “Jin Ping Mei i vers og prosa”, I-X (Vandkunsten, 2011-2022) and “Jin Ping Mei – A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature” (ed. by Vibeke Børdahl and Lintao Qi) (NIAS Press 2022).Dr. Vibeke Børdahl is a senior researcher at NIAS and is generally recognized as one of the most accomplished scholars in the study of Chinese oral literature. As well as doing much research on the interplay of oral and written traditions in Chinese popular literature and performance culture, over the past decade she has translated the full work of Jin Ping Mei into Danish. The publication is celebrated with a symposium 26-28 October supported by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Carlsberg Academy and NIAS.Find the NIAS Press book here.Translation editions by Vandkunsten are here.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his language of composition. Mr. Diop wrote his first five novels in French, but after Murambi, shifted to Wolof, the most widely spoken language in his home country of Senegal. Asked to describe the difference between writing in French and writing in Wolof, Mr. Diop sums it up memorably: “When I start writing in French, I shut the door; I shut the window…I don’t hear the words I’m writing. When I write in Wolof, I hear every word.”Sarah and Mr. Diop discuss whether translation can be an ally to a Wolof worldview or whether the sounds that Mr. Diop hears through his window will inevitably be lost to readers who encounter his Wolof novels in English or French. Their dialogue suggests that, while Wolof represents a form of linguistic emancipation from the legacy of a French colonial education, there is also discovery and freedom in raising the literary profile of Wolof for an international audience. Mr. Diop’s Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks is the first Wolof novel to be translated into English and an excerpt from his second Wolof novel Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma is available in translation here.In response to our signature question of the season, Mr. Diop proposes that the Wolof word “keroog” is very difficult to translate but not impossible. And it spurs an impromptu comparison to the Spanish word “ahorita,” which like “keroog,” blurs the distinctions between present, past, and future. In an episode about personal and political memory, nothing could be more fitting!Mentioned in this episode:--Toni Morrison--Gabriel Garcia Marquez--Mario Vargas Llosa--Ernesto Sábato--Léopold Sédar Senghor--Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks--Les Petits de la guenon (French Translation of Doomi Golo)--Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma – literally translated as Kocc Barma's Grave (Diop’s second Wolof novel)--Malaanum Lëndëm – Diop’s third Wolof novel--Alice Chaudemanche (French translator of Malaanum Lëndëm)--Pierre Nora – French historian--Marianne Hirsch--“Sites mémoriaux du génocide” – memorial sites of genocide (term used by UNESCO that qualify as heritage sites.)--Rwandan term – “ejo” (similar to keroog) from the language: KinyarwandaFind out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations.He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be ModernPierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (including essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe.Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: A Feminist Critique (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly.However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.Mary J. Magoulick is professor of English at Georgia College and State University.Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Fictions is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the mid-20th century, Latin American literature gained a worldwide audience, in part thanks to Borges. His works popularized the idea that literature coming from Latin America cannot be reduced to tropical fantasies or realist depictions of exotic worlds. Mariano Siskind is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Some of his research interests include 19th and 20th century Latin American Literature, theories of globalization, and psychoanalysis. He has written books such as Deseos cosmopolitas and Historia del Abasto. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies