New Books in Literary Studies

In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Leni Shilton takes us back to Central Australia of the 1930s to tell the story of Bertha Strehlow, one of very few white women living among Aboriginal people at the time. In her new collection, The Sky Runs Right Through Us: Poems from the Edge of the Indian Ocean (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Renee Pettitt-Schipp recounts her time working with asylum seeker and islander students on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an experience that can never be forgotten, even after her return to the Australian mainland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession—from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV—is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its ostensible artlessness, and always on the move between and across media. The work’s archive is expansive, placing in conversation poetry, performance art, comedy, legal confession, film, and reality TV, genres whose conventions transform and whose boundaries blur when confronted with artists impulses to confess, to stage what Grobe calls “breakthroughs” out of both generic and sociocultural containment. Laying bare the ways confessional performances are stylized and mediated to elicit “a satiety of experience which can be taken as reality” while taking seriously artists’ attempts to reveal and perform an authentic self, Grobe demonstrates how confession energizes new ways of being, forms of collectivity, and political mobilization. Christopher Grobe is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College where he teaches a wide range of courses on drama, poetics, performance, and performance culture and theory. Petal Samuel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is completing Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Decolonial Soundscapes, a book project that traces the evolution of noise legislation and public discourses decrying noise as technologies of racial control in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, while highlighting the ways Afro-Caribbean women writers have reclaimed noise against the grain of colonial injunctions to remain quiet as a condition of civic inclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level transfers that created the meaning of the Civl War.” He follows the correspondence of a group of soldiers, and their family members, many of whom had never written letters before in their life. These people were largely illiterate. They had to learn how to spell as they were trying to compose their thoughts on paper. Yet Hager leaves their letters ‘uncorrected.’ In their struggle to put their feelings and thoughts into words—a struggle we also feel in reading those words—the words themselves gain an immediacy and directness. They grow in importance for being chosen. The repetition of phrases throbs with feeling. The emotional dynamics of union and disunion—the fear of being forgotten, the assurance of love, no matter the soldier’s side in the war—congeal around individual words, phrases, even marks on the page. As they write, both soldiers and their family members realize that they’re at war together, tending to the relationships that comprise their everyday lives, and warding off the threats to them. Christopher Hager has previously explored the lives of ordinary Americans through their writing, including diaries kept by slaves. His first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, won the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book of the year on the subject of slavery. Hager is Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where he teaches courses in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@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

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers, and whose remittances back to the Philippines contribute to about 9% of its GDP or around twenty billion dollars. These migrants circulate through the world serving in positions of nurture, care, and service. Suarez examines literary, film, and cultural representations of these figures as part and parcel of a broader historical movement that structures the Philippines under globalization. To understand the multiple sites and histories of these figures, Suarez employs a framework that he calls “the diasporic maternal,” which focuses on the various forms of care and service that these migrants occupy throughout the world. Through a reading method that Suarez calls “archipelagic reading,” Suarez attempts to trace the undercurrents of these narratives that expose the feelings, desires and strategies that exist outside of motherhood and maternal care. 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 Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2018), Mikhail Epstein offers strategies on how to engage with texts in the current continuum. Based on the subversion of linearity as a principle component of chronological construction of literary phenomena, Epstein’s new book emphasizes the idea of text as a node or cluster that includes and incorporates multiple elements which intersect and collaborate, producing a diversity of cultural/literary echoes. To proceed with these lines, Mikhail Epstein re-visits Russian literature from the perspectives of paradoxes that arise when multiple views and points are considered. Starting with the exploration of Pushkin’s works, this book, at first glance, may give the impression that the author undertakes a chronological approach. However, Pushkin is situated alongside Goethe: Epstein does not simply offer comparative explorations; he seeks to outline matrixes that contribute to the illumination of paradoxes that shape the development of Russian literature. It should be noted that this conversation is not limited to the study of one national literature: Epstein’s idea of texts/literatures as megatexts that embrace a multiplicity of texts that we conventionally connect with certain historical periods or cultural contexts is productive for revisiting literary history on a larger scale. In this interview, Mikhail Epstein notes that The Irony of the Ideal is executed in a rather traditional way. While it may be true—the approach to texts offered in this research, however, may indicate otherwise—this traditional way functions in an innovative manner, producing further proliferations of the familiar. The Irony of the Ideal consists of six parts, each exploring a different angle of Russian literary paradoxes: the titanic and the demonic, the great and the humble, the word and silence, madness and reason, etc. In addition to identifying paradoxes that shape Russian literature, Mikhail Epstein also attempts to illustrate their continuity and flexibility. Thus, for example, readers are offered to examine famous Russian characters, which can be summarized as meek—of course at first glance—in the continuum of literary and cultural echoing. The Irony of the Ideal asks us to subvert some literary expectations in order to explore versatile layers of both texts and reading. Another intriguing point is the combination of word and silence that also contributes to the creation of controversies that Russian literature appears to indulge in and to be involved into: language produces not only sound environment, so to speak, but silences as well. In a subtle way, Epstein guides his readers through the labyrinths that language—and texts as well—generates. In the final chapter, “Madness and Reason,” Mikhail Epstein includes the periodic table of Russian literature (cycles and phases of development), providing brief summaries for each cycle. However, the final stage of the table, Cycle 4 “The new sociality. Metapolitics: play with the signs of various political systems, political-literary-theatrical hybrids,” is marked with blank sections. This silence, as Mikhail Epstein mentions in the interview, is an invitation to further develop current cultural developments and to maintain current dialogues concerning the nature of literature, language, text. It is an invitation extended to readers to indulge in the multiplicities of texts which are perceived as ever-evolving entities. This understanding of texts invites a reader who looks forward to exploring textual tapestries surpassing the boundaries of time and space. Mikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How can reading change the world? In Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Nicholas Hengen Fox, who teaches literature, writing and social justice courses at Portland Community College, explores how literature can make a public impact. A timely book that speaks directly to our current political moment, Reading as Collective Action calls for a move beyond the text in itself to understand how texts are used to imagine and create another world. The potential of a world transformed is seen in the analysis of poetry’s importance after September 11th; The Grapes of Wrath, practical organizing, and the politics of redistribution in response to the great recession; along with how efforts to make texts public might transform academic institutions. The book closes by contextualizing the analysis with Habermas’ theories, offering a note of optimism. At present the book is an essential read for anyone thinking through how best to make a social, political, and aesthetic difference. 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 Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Kevin Patrick examines the history of The Phantom—an American comic strip superhero that made his debut in 1936. Although not popular in the United States, The Phantom knows a long history and popularity in Australia, Sweden, and India. In The Phantom Unmasked, Patrick explores this history. By tracing the publication history of The Phantom and connecting its success to the media licensing industries starting in the 1930s and 40s, Patrick presents an under-explored history to show the role of this comic in international markets and its importance for understanding how international markets worked. In The Phantom, Patrick assesses how historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions impacted The Phantom’s rise in popularity in Australia, Sweden, and India. In addition, he surveys Phans in order to explain how they have come to love the superhero. Well researched and informative, The Phantom Unmasked adds to the burgeoning comic history. 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/literary-studies

What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environment and intangible notions of identity? Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean (Liverpool University Press, 2017) examines these questions in a rich body of works from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique. The book proposes two key concepts to aid in our understanding of Caribbean writers’ construction of identity in their literary works. The term “architexture” asks readers to be attentive to the building blocks of the text and the inner workings of literary works that reflect on themselves and reach out beyond their own pages to be in conversation with other writers, other texts, other stories. Authenticity underscores the ever-present specter of the colonial past and the possibilities for drawing on multiple influences (or in Herbeck’s terminology, using multiple building materials) to construct a unique and original Caribbean identity. Drawing on a range of writers including Maryse Conde, Daniel Maximin and Yanick Lahens, this book steps back from a narrow view of the finished edifice and takes in the scaffolding and mortar that holds these narratives together. Jason Herbeck is Professor of French at Boise State University. His research focuses primarily on evolving narrative forms in twentieth and twenty-first-century French and French-Caribbean literatures, and how these forms relate to expressions and constructions of identity. In addition to many articles and book chapters devoted to the literatures and histories of Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe, he has also published widely on Albert Camus and is, since 2009, President of the North American Section of the Societe des Etudes Camusiennes. 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 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

In her new book Der bewegende Blick: Literarische Blickinszenierungen der Moderne (Rombach Verlag, 2014)—The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature—Margarete Fuchs, a postdoc at the Philipps University of Marburg, examines the role of gaze and looking within modern German literature. By studying various important authors, such as Heinrich Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin she uncovers several dimensions of the gaze. For example, she points at the modernist feelings of crisis— identity crisis, language crisis, crisis of anonymity, and loneliness and links all this with gaze. On the one hand, gazes might offer a solution by establishing social connectedness, but on the other hand, gazes can also be used for gaining power over other people. Interestingly, both of these dimensions and even further aspects can be found within modernist literature.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018). Brooks narrates the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research, but in the land and communities of Native New England, illuminating the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Readers can also participate in a remapping of the “First Indian War,” later renamed “King Philip’s War.” Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies