New Books in Literary Studies

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. 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 modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relationship. Indeed, throughout human history the technological and supernatural, the scientific and the spiritual have repeatedly interacted, informing each other’s respective discourses and reinventing themselves based on encounters with new ideas. In the nineteenth century, when a period of sustained and rapid scientific advancement transformed the human understanding of the universe, new discoveries about the invisible forces that shaped our lives – from the electromagnetic spectrum to soundwaves and the subatomic universe – encouraged many to believe that the invisible realm of the supernatural could be similarly understood through recourse to scientific principles and methodologies. It is this intersection of the scientific and the supernatural that forms the basis of Christopher G. White’s exciting new publication, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Published in 2018 by Harvard University Press, Other Worlds offers a unique insight into the relationship between religion and scientific thought at a time of rapid social, cultural and intellectual change. In the book, White focuses primarily on the imaginative power and pervasive influence of one key scientific concept: the possibly that the universe might hold within it unseen, higher dimensions. Over the course of his study, White analyses how a host of diverse individuals and groups –  from scientists and mathematicians to writers, artists and even televangelists –  have appropriated the notion of higher dimensions in order to explore, rationalise and explain supernatural phenomena. White maintains that rather than undermining religious beliefs, new scientific ideas, particularly those derived from physics, provided the faithful with a new framework for conceptualising the divine. Undertaking a comprehensive survey of various scientific, spiritual and literary discourses on higher dimensions, White moves from nineteenth-century treatises by Edwin Abbott and C. Howard Hinton to late twentieth-century science-fiction texts like A Wrinkle in Time and The Twilight Zone. In doing so, White shows how rather than opposing intellectual factions, science and spirituality have long been intertwined, with the scientific often providing individuals with new and engaging ways to imagine religious spaces and concepts. Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an encyclopedia, or a universal compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in Mamluk Egypt, written by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri. It covered multiple facets of knowledge, from science to history. He talks to us about his inspiration for the book, the structure, the content, and the context of the Ultimate Ambition, its afterlife in the Muslim and the European world and the role of book history in Middle Eastern history. Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions. Muhanna’s publications include an abridged translation of al-Nuwayri’s encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, for Penguin Classics. He is heavily involved in the digital humanities. He edited The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016). He is the creator of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown, a multi-year initiative that convenes an annual conference and hosts a variety of research activities. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker’s online edition, and his essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics. 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/literary-studies

How does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not only linguistic phenomena, but historical, sociological, and literary issues as well. Andrii Danylenko’s From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian (Academic Studies Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of the development of the Ukrainian language and discusses how the creative input of an individual writer and a translator may engage with the process of language creation. Pantelejmon Kuliš, as Danylenko emphasizes, is a controversial figure in the history of Ukrainian literature: he is attributed with persistent resistance against linguistic rigidity and stagnation. As From the Bible to Shakespeare demonstrates, Kuliš was driven by his passion for writing and translation that provided space for creative interactions, filled with a strong potential to connect diverse and eclectic dialogues across cultures and nations. For Kuliš, language is a canvas which is made out of a number of elements that change and modify alongside the metamorphosis of the speaker’s/writer’s/artist’s imagination. Andrii Danylenko traces Kuliš’s artistic understanding of language while providing a profound analysis of linguistic phenomena dispersed throughout Kuliš’s translation experiments. These observations are accompanied by insightful historical and sociological notes that help reveal language as an entity that mutates when interacting with a diversity of phenomena. Andrii Danylenko’s From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian is a profound study that offers an insight into a complex process of the development of language, embracing the formation of the literary and the national. Kuliš’s translations represent an intriguing study case not only for the exploration of linguistic synthesis, but also for investigation of identity fluidity that stems from openness towards linguistic and cultural dialogism.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

People have long been captivated by stories of dragons. Myths related to dragon slaying can be found across many civilizations around the world, even among the most ancient cultures including ancient Israel. In his book The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations, Robert Miller chronicles the trajectories and transformations of this myth, and brings out the major role of dragon slaying in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about an age-old, fascinating topic: dragons! Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His other books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), and Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012). Robert teaches courses in Old Testament, the ancient Near East, and Archaeology. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author ofThe Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World (Otago University Press, 2018), Helen Bones, a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, presents a new look at late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand literary culture. Contrary to the stereotype that New Zealand writers were “exiled” overseas, Bones follows the lives of a set of writers who, even as they may have been mobile around the colonial world, should, in fact, be recognized for their contributions as New Zealand writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzes with remarkable nimbleness the interaction of literature, politics, and power in medieval imperial settings. Effortlessly traversing from Buyid Baghdad to Spain and Italy, England shows ways in which literary competition, especially in poetry, pollinated imperial visions and fissures of political sovereignty. Literature and literary duels performed in the space of the imperial court, England convincingly argues, were critical to assemblage of medieval imperial sovereignty. This finely written book will interest and delight scholars of literature, religion, politics, and history-students of Arabic will especially appreciate the copious exhibition of wonderful Arabic poetry throughout the text. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), Sami Schalk argues that black women’s speculative fiction changes the rules of literary and textual interpretation by opening up productive spaces of conversation at the intersection of (dis)ability, race and gender. Schalk undertakes a close reading of a variety of genres of speculative fiction including science fiction and neo-slave narratives by authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin. Her book shows the range of black women authors’ exploration and critique of marginalizing social and political structures and their visions for more just, equitable futures. Sami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American literature, speculative fiction, and women’s literature. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism. In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Mohammed Merah,”  a fictionalized account of the 2012 Toulouse attacks, told from the point of view of the murderer. We also talk about earlier influential figures, such as Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and discuss how the vocabularies they invented, which they used to retool ideas of evil, transgression, and “our common inhumanity,” come to be recoded in service of a new “moralistic turn.” Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality of Indigenous literatures and their ability to help make sense of our world. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) is one-part literary exegesis, one-part memoir, and many parts radical text which calls for, among other things, broader human and non-human kinship, and the use of indigenous literatures to push back against settler colonial forms of erasure and oppression. Justice explores the vibrant universe of over two hundred years of literatures (written and non-written alike), from autobiography to spoken word poetry, to fantasy and wonderworks, in order to make the case that yes, of course indigenous literatures matter; they do so because indigenous people matter. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter thus acts as both indigenous literary bibliography and call to action to people of indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds to read up and take notice of indigenous people speaking back to colonial power structures. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies