New Books in Literary Studies

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mark Nowak's Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020) is a history of the poetry workshop "from below and to the left." Inspired by previous workers' poetry workshops led by writers like June Jordan and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nowak's book traces the history of worker poetry both in the US and abroad. It also details Nowak's own involvement with workers' poetry workshops held with autoworkers facing layoffs, farm workers in Hudson Valley, and metal workers in South Africa. Nowak shows that poetry is not a luxury for the elite, but a vital tool in describing working class lives and in imagining a classless future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies.Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books, 2020) is a fascinating cross-genre book that combines elements of traditional biography with Shapland's own personal narrative of researching McCullers and discovering the many ways her life and McCullers' mirror each other. McCullers was a lesbian, but many of her biographers have shied away from this aspect of her life, referring to her partners as "friends" or "obsessions." Shapland's book is a bold work of historical reclamation, insisting we view McCullers as a queer writer and drawing attention to previously-obscured elements of queerness in her work. It is also a portrait of a vibrant queer community existing beneath the placid surface of mid-century America: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gypsy Rose Lee, and W.H. Auden all make memorable appearances in its pages. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a must-read for fans of McCullers, but it will also be of interest to fans of cross-genre writers like Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, and Hilton Als.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, Elam foregrounds theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way rather to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of imperial rule, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Aligning Frantz Fanon’s political writing with Erich Auerbach’s philological project, Elam brings together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought to demonstrate how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.Zifeng Liu is a PhD candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom (Routledge, 2018) proposes a way of constructing hidden psychological narratives of popular film and novels. Instead of offering interpretations of classic films, Trevor C. Pederson recognizes that the psychoanalytic tradition began with making sense of the seemingly inconsequential. Here he turns his attention to popular films like Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987). While masterworks like Psycho (1960) are not the object of interpretation, Hitchcock's film is used as a skeleton key. The revelation that Norman Bates' character had been his mother all along, suggests a framework of reading a film as having symptom characters who are excised to create a latent plot. The symptom character's behavior or inter-relations are then transcribed to an ego character. This is a shift in the tradition of literary doubling from hermeneutic intuition to a formal methodology that generates data for the unconscious.Pederson continues the project of unifying competing schools into a single model of mind and offers clinical examples from his own practice for all its terms. Psychodynamic techniques that emphasize the importance of working with the body, the id, and the ubiquity of repetition are introduced. A return to Freud's structural theory, in which complexes are anchored in the stages of superego development, is used to carefully plot and explain the social nature of the superego and its relation to authority in society (secondary narcissism) and the otherworldly (primary narcissism). Discrete phases of superego development and their ties to both the social and the id revive the grand promises of classical psychoanalysis to link with every field in the humanities.Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of film studies and literature interested in using a psychoanalytic approach and ideas in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear: an overview of the publishing process (from the author side), what makes a strong proposal, common mistakes to avoid when approaching a university press, and advice for both aspiring and seasoned authors.Our guest is: Kimberly Guinta, Editorial Director at Rutgers University Press. In addition to managing the editorial program for the press, she is responsible for acquiring books in the areas of Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Caribbean and Latin American Studies. Kim arrived at Rutgers University Press in 2015 from Routledge, where she spent 15 years acquiring in U.S. and Latin American History.Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher ed scholar and practitioner. She specializes in relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana met Kim Guinta in 2015 when Kim served as the acquiring editor for Dana’s book, From Single to Serious. Things that make Dana’s heart happy include making delicious, healthy food, doing yoga, having inspiring conversations, and wandering the coastline of the Jersey shore.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Ask UP Publishing programs in NYC: Pace University NYU Columbia Rachel Toor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, columns on publishing  From Dissertation to Book (2nd ed.) by William Germano Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (3rd ed.) by William Germano Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (updated ed.) by Beth Luey Handbook for Academic Authors (5th ed.) by Beth Luey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, Claire Myers Owens sought adventure and freedom at an early age. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York's Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman's Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its "risqu " content. Drawn to ideals of selfactualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, and became an ardent follower of Carl Jung. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, moving to Rochester, NY, where she joined the Zen Center and studied under Roshi Philip Kapleau. She published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three.In Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse UP, 2019), Friedman brings well-deserved attention to Owen's little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Friedman chronicles Owens's robust intellect and her tumultuous private life and, along the way, shows readers what makes her story significant. With very few role models in the early twentieth century, Owens blazed her own path of independence and enlightenment.Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary, and reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. She supports her work-life balance with long walks and her love of photography, which you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the several decades since scholars in the humanities have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, including visualization methods to create charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other graphic displays of information. But are these visualizations actually adequate for the interpretive approach that distinguishes much of the work in the humanities? Information visualization, as practiced today, lacks the interpretive frameworks required for humanities-oriented methodologies. In Visualization and Interpretation, Johanna Drucker continues her interrogation of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, reorienting the creation of digital tools within humanities contexts.Johanna Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020)through Inscriptions is an intuitive introduction to inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world. Inscriptions can help contextualize certain events associated with the New Testament in a way that many widely circulated literary texts do not. This book both introduces inscriptions and demonstrates sound methodological use of them in the study of the New Testament. Through five case studies, it highlights the largely unrecognized ability of inscriptions to shed light on early Christian history, practice, and the leadership structure of early Christian churches, as well as to solve certain New Testament exegetical impasses.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies