New Books in Literary Studies

How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Focusing on the singular character of Packy Jim McGrath and the narratives that feature in his repertoire—from personal experience narratives to stories about the supernatural—we are taken into a lifeworld in which Packy Jim struggles with and develops his own answer to questions of authority, power, sacrifice, place, belief, and more, in a world of limited good. As many people told Cashman during his fieldwork (though they mean something slightly different), “If you want real folklore, Packy Jim is your man.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017)) is an analysis of the idea of “Europe” in modern German literature. It not only deals with important issues such as spaces, borders, multilingualism and European identity, but also states that there is in fact something like a European poetic. Based on a division into two major parts, this study looks on the one side at essays and pamphlets and on the other side at contemporary German literature from Terezia Mora and Ilma Rakusa. In this way, the book convincingly achieves new literary perspectives on current European questions.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s complex and sophisticated text will have great appeal to political theorists and political philosophers as well as scholars of American political development and American letters and literature. Laski explores the idea of temporality in context of American democracy, and democracy generally, and the concept of progress as we often consider it in relation to post-slavery America. Untimely Democracy highlights an often-under-explored area of American politics, in the post-bellum writers and their discourse that examines a period of stasis as Reconstruction comes to an end and African-American liberty does not, in fact, expand. Laski approaches these theoretical considerations through post-Civil war writers like Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Callie House, W.E.B Dubois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and others. The thrust of this exploration is to reposition, in a sense, the concept of racial progress and the quest for liberty—providing a counter-discourse to the expected linear arc generally associated with racial progress. Laski’s examination is multilayered and examines these written and rhetorical works, especially within an analysis that explores our understanding of time, memory, recollection, and progress as an only-forward moving trajectory. This book takes the reader on a journey through concepts of temporal distinctions or horizons within a democratic quest, examining what Laski titles “untimely democracy”—neither clear progress, nor a forgetting of the past, but a consideration of democracy and the concept of expanded liberty from within a context that is bracketed in time and that explores this tension within time. 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 National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Rebecca Janzen explores the complex interaction between the national body created by the rhetoric of the 1910 Mexican revolution and those bodies that did not find a space in the new national project. Through the literary fictional work of Jose Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, and Vicente Lenero, the book explores the contradictions of the state through the literary representations of people that lived at the margins of its ideology. Drawing on feminist and disability studies, Janzen explores unusual bodies—peasants, prostitutes, indigenous people, and garbage sorters, among others—and their intense relationship of control, resistance, and power with the government and its bureaucracy. In these literary works, illness, body fluids, or bodies reduced to their basic functions demonstrate the inconsistencies of a national project that failed to fulfill promises such as agrarian reform, health services or labor rights. Each chapter of the book shows an analysis deeply engaged with the profound changes of almost three decades. The characters created by Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos, and Lenero span from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, which allows Janzen to show not only the construction of a national discourse and its flaws, but also its interaction with other important institutions, such as the Catholic church. Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at 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 his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—from bold, new angles. Rather than using the diary as a historical source, Goldberg’s book centers on the diary as its subject. In addition to closely analyzing the more well-known diaries of Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan, Goldberg incorporates a wide variety of lesser-known first-person narratives into his work, showing the widespread nature of diary writing as a cultural phenomenon during the part. Combining the methods of history, literary studies, and psychology, this impressively interdisciplinary book asks: how did the unfolding of the Holocaust changed victims inner selves? His answers to this question expose the tensions between creation and destruction, and the duality of helplessness and agency, that characterize this genre. Amos Goldberg is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Young follows shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that “mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense” (10). Where systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists shape and shift the social world as new uses for the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools “simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert social systems,” List Cultures proves to be a rewardingly vigorous and sweeping intellectual history. List Cultures restores formal analysis to a critical discourse divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earliest writing (inventories and transaction records), Young builds his case for the primacy of the list by explicating the ways lists negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have persisted across time. Young extends the work of Foucault, Latour, Borges, Benjamin, Ong, Innis and many others, demonstrating that listing is a cultural technique that constitutes concepts and categories on which technical systems and social institutions are built. List Cultures explores the pop charts and the innerworkings of Buzzfeed, giving readers a chance to see our world anew through the lens of media materialism. Lists draw borders, create hierarchies, and provide points of reference in the world of tastemaking and fandom, and speed the spread of viral media through databases and traced signatures. As an extension and counterpoint, the exploration of lists in the administrative states of Renaissance Italy and Nazi Germany provide careful reflections on how lists have been used to establish facts, determine personhood, police subjects, and build structures of knowledge that expose bodies to violence. Making the case for modernity as primarily logistical in orientation, Young closes List Cultures with a heartening meditation on ways the list has been used to remake old orders, explode boundaries, and extend horizons of possibility. Following Wolfgang Ernst’s argument that real-time data collection channels ancient forms of organizing time, List Cultures‘ final chapter plays with a binary of narrative and non-narrative modes of writing and thinking, asking us to consider how lists can displace the logic of logistical modernity and preserve a heterotopian space for thinking “other.” Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sovereignty is a key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, but its also a term that is understood in multiple ways. Working across the boundaries of legal and literary theory, David J. Carlson‘s Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) examines the works, both creative and theoretical, of many Native intellectuals who have considered sovereignty in the past century. Sovereignty emerges in this study as a necessarily imprecise concept that mediates between indigenous communities and also with the settler colonial government of the United States. Carlson discusses thinkers who have previously been seen as opposed, showing ways that their disparate projects can in fact be seen via the idea of self-determination as in many ways complementary. James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For those of us who pay close attention in Sunday school, a troubling dissimilarity may begin to appear between what we are told of God’s personality and what we learn of it from His actions. For example, we are told that God is merciful, just, compassionate, and the very definition of love and forgiveness. However, the Bible lays out God’s primary qualities very differently: he is jealous, petty, unforgiving, bloodthirsty, vindictive, and worse! Originally conceived as a joint presentation between influential thinker and bestselling author Richard Dawkins and former evangelical preacher Dan Barker, the book we will be talking about today, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (Sterling, 2016) provides an investigation into this rather serious discrepancy. Barker combs through both the Old and New Testament (as well as thirteen different Bible editions), presenting powerful evidence for why the Scripture shouldn’t govern our everyday lives. Dan Barker is a former evangelical minister and current atheist. He is the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, cohost of Freethought Radio, and cofounder and board member of the Clergy Project. A widely sought-after lecturer, debater, and performer, he regularly discusses atheism and lifes meaning and purpose in the national media, with past appearances on Oprah, The Daily Show, The O’Reilly Factor, Good Morning America, and many others. He is here with me today to talk about this witty, well-researched book and explain to us how the evidence in it suggests that we should move past the Bible and clear a path to a kinder and more thoughtful world. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. 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 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 Longing for the Good. The Relationship between Literature and Ethics in the Work of Peter Handke (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), Tanja Angela Kunz, a postdoc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, analyzes the work of the Austrian contemporary writer Peter Handke from a new perspective: By consulting philosophical theories about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics she achieves a new understanding of Handke’s very specific style of writing. Within this context, Kunz’s observation of different patterns of representations of the good within Handke’s work is especially interesting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies