New Books in Literary Studies

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, and thousands of documents later, Professor Robert Darnton has published a new book, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018). Apart from illuminating the everyday life of the trade that enabled and shaped French reading practices, the book is a methodological feat that mines an impressive array of sources to access the financial, legal, political, and cultural history of book distribution before the French Revolution. Following the trail of Jean-Francois Favager, a sales rep of the S.T.N. who toured France in 1778, Darnton’s thirteen chapters trace his journey from Neuchatel, across the border into France, down the southeast to Lyon and Marseille, west towards Bordeaux, then north before crossing back to Besancon and home (with many stops in between). As the book pursues Favager’s story, the reader learns about the challenges of travel by horse in this period, including border-crossings, the network of roads that connected French towns and cities in the eighteenth century, and the many obstacles that arose along the way. A history of the movement of foreign books into a French market, A Literary Tour de France also explores the histories of smuggling, piracy, contract and business law and values. Focused on the world of books in the French provinces, rather than Paris, this study offers today’s reader insight into the demands and supplies of their eighteenth-century counterparts and the range of booksellers who sold their wares. The result is a rich and textured account of how and what many French people were able to read in the decades before the upheaval of 1789. I encourage all of you to visit the books companion website, including a treasure of primary sources that will enhance and extend the reading of A Literary Tour de France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. 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 new book, Wissen um Stimmung (Knowledge of Mood), Sergej Rickenbacher, a post-doc at the University of Aachen, examines two works of Robert Musil from the perspective of knowledge and atmosphere/mood. In doing so, his approach differs from traditional readings of Musil and thus sheds new light on his work. Of particular interest are Rickenbacher’s exploration of the importance of space and fragrances within Musil’s writing.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Although largely forgotten today, elocution was a popular form of domestic and professional entertainment from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. Elocution is the dramatic reading of poetry, adapted plays, and other types of monologues by a solo performer. Dr. Marian Wilson Kimber’s new book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the first study to examine elocutionists who recited spoken word accompanied by music and proscribed movements that reflected the emotional meaning of the piece. Informed by archival sources gathered all over the country, Wilson Kimber engages with this practice through multiple lenses, including gender, race, and class as she untangles not only how elocution was performed, but also what it meant to its practitioners and audiences. She highlights important figures that some may know from other areas such as Kitty Cheatham, an advocate for and performer of African American spirituals, and the actress Fanny Kemble. However, most of the women she profiles were performers, entrepreneurs, and composers whose work has disappeared from public view as their artform fell out of favor. In addition to reciting in concert halls and for women’s clubs, professional elocutionists usually taught others and many founded their own schools in towns and cities throughout the United States. Their work helped create opportunities for women to move into professional occupations and contributed to twentieth-century conceptions of middle-class respectability. Dr. Wilson Kimber has videotaped several reconstructions of elocution performances which can be seen on her YouTube channel here. They are surprisingly humorous and address topics that people will recognize today including the pressure on women to dress fashionably, the excitement of a summer romance, and the aches and pains of aging. Learn more about The Elocutionists here. Marian Wilson Kimber is a professor in the School of Music at the University of Iowa. Her work centers on gender and music of the long nineteenth century in Germany and the United States. She has published articles on anti-Semitism in the reception of music by Felix Mendelssohn in The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, the piano work of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel in The Journal of Musicological Research, and issues of feminist biography in the life of Fanny Hensel in Nineteenth–Century Music. The Elocutionists has been supported by subventions from the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society, as well as research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She is also an active member of the American Musicological Society and the University Iowa Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet. It considers the question of what happens when a woman enters a field dominated by men; in this case, poetry. Using her own poetry and biographical dictionaries (the tezkire genre), Havlioglu contextualizes Mihri and tries to understand her as a product of her own time and as someone who understood her multiple roles in society well enough to subvert them. Didem Havlioglu is Instructor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. Her interests include Modern/Ottoman Language and Literature, Islamic Aesthetics, Women and Gender in the Middle East, Women Writers in the Intellectual History of the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. 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

Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Dr. Andrew Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, inspired him to discover a ground-breaking treatment for Parkinson’s Disease, and learns how to use the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes to diagnose patients. Lees follows Burroughs into the rainforest and under the influence of yage (ayahuasca) gains insights that encourage him to pursue new lines of pharmacological research and explore new forms of science. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (SUNY Press, 2017), Christine Arce rightfully stresses that these two figures have greatly influenced Mexico’s national identity, arts, and popular culture. However, their personal names and presences have remained hardly recognized by the state and in the historical narratives. Through a skillful and deep archival research, Arce brings to the readers attention not only the legacy of these women, the spaces they inhabited, and their impact during different moments in history the colonial era, the Mexican revolution, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1930s-1950s but also the complex relations they had with the government. The critical narrative of Arce challenges the nobodiness, [el ninguneo] that these women had underwent for a very long time. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as well as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, focuses on the changing form, fate, and function of messianism, law, exile, election and remembrance in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism and the current period. Liska’s book challenges and historicizes postmodern and contemporary takes on German-Jewish thinkers. She leaves us with a set of new and unanswered questions in this very interesting and provocative book. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au 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, A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (UWA Publishing, 2018), Ann-Marie Priest, a lecturer at Central Queensland University, explores the literary lives of four Australian women—Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead, and Ruth Park—who challenged the 20th-century notion of artist as distinctly male. Priest offers biographical and cultural insights into these pioneering women whose urgency to write (their “vocation”) would not be denied. 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, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines the historical development of appearances of dilettantism by analyzing works of Karl Philipp Moritz, Carl Einstein and Thomas Bernhard. She uncovers how the discussion about dilettantism is linked with the question of what is considered to be art and what should be excluded. Moreover, she shows how in the 20th-century dilettantism has turned from a negative into a positive concept and how the arrival of the electronic media in our age can be debated against the backdrop of the dilettantism discourse. Altogether, the book deals with historically changing designs of anthropology, aesthetics and writing styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio, even if all the clocks around him flash the fact that it isn’t, even if he’s taking my mother, for example, on their once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii and the sun is setting in perfect postcard colors. “No wonder I’m sleepy,” he’ll say, glancing at his watch. “It’s two in the morning.” I don’t know quite why it drives me so crazy. Maybe it’s his small refusal to accept where he is at that moment or maybe its his small insistence that, at any moment, he’s always home. I just know that, with a wristwatch and a strong will, my father has decided to ignore the laws of time. It turns out that he’s not so different from most of us who fly frequently from one time zone to another. In his new book, Jet Lag (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Chris Lee illuminates what happens to us when, thousands of feet in the air, trapped in an uncomfortable seat in coach or luxuriously sprawled out in first-class, we race ahead of the clock or fall behind it. Suddenly the sun shines when it shouldn’t or the night comes to soon, and were out of synch, not only with time but, it can seem, with the world around us, even with ourselves. We’re jet-lagged, and, as Lee cleverly shows, were experiencing much more than an inconvenience. We’re experiencing something like modernity itself, where time, technology, and our global condition are not only made evident but also, as we stagger off our flights, exhausting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies