New Books in Literary Studies

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused and initiated by the programs aimed at the redefinition of economy and society. The spheres of family and economy appear to not only absorb changes and transformations instigated by the strengthening of communist rhetoric, but also to exercise influences on the formation and on the development of Soviet literature, reshaping the aesthetic continuum and revealing the collision of paradigms and epistemes. While focusing on the texts that illuminate the peculiarities of Russian Modernism (Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Yuri Olesha’s Envy), Alternative Kinships also includes a detailed discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Miroslav Krleza’s The Return of Filip Latinovicz, and Isak Dinesen’s stories. This comparative attempt discloses intricate interconnections not only between literatures and cultures but between ideologies and political programs as well. Jacob Emery points out, “Like the authors of Russian modernism, Hawthorne, Krlea, and Dinesen are concerned with alternative kinships that take shape at a moment of crisis in the history of hereditary castes: the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, and, in Dinesen’s historical fiction, a preoccupation with inheritance mechanisms in the period just before and after the French Revolution “(10-11). Literature appears to respond to political developments, which bring forth crucial shifts, redefining the areas of the familiar and of the conventional. As Alternative Kinships demonstrates, Soviet literature offers an array of intriguing possibilities for reshaping family relationships. In addition, these experiments are inextricably connected with the Soviet economic endeavors. One of the fascinating family experiments that Jacob Emery extensively comments on is “milk kinship,” which, under the Soviet regime,” aimed to replac[e] traditional ideas of kinship” (113). State-run milk banks, Emery argues, is “the metaphor of a transcendental mother supplying a universal family” (115). Russian modernism generates a number of scenarios, portraying not only the redefinition of social and economic relations but also the transformation of the individual: alternative kinships call for New Men and Women. Alongside family relationships, which respond to economic, political, ideological modifications, Alternative Kinships also touches upon hereditary memory: family is inseparable from the memory that reveals itself in multiple ways. Aesthetic and literary interconnections that Jacob Emery outlines through the analysis of gothic and modernist texts initiate a conversation about cultural memory: literary texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of the aesthetics, history, society, and the individual. Literature as a complex construct that incorporates a number of components and fragments, which establish a variety of relationships, can be illustrated with the image of mirror, which is closely analyzed in Alternative Kinships. Mirror is actively employed to show family relationships and to reveal the potential of a literary text to absorb and to respond to the environment. Revealing the dynamics of family and economy relationships across times and cultures, Alternative Kinships contributes to the discussion of international modernism(s), Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth (Book One) and Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth (Book Two), which follow the last humans eleven generations removed from Earth as their 10-mile-long spaceship arrives on a new planet. As befits a man who wears many hats, Tomlinson’s books are not easily categorized, mixing mystery, science fiction, cultural commentary and adventure. The third book in the series, Children of the Divide, is due out in August. Rob Wolf is the author of the science fiction novels The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema, and his work has been singled out for excellence by the New York Public Library, The Missouri Review, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. 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 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, “Congo Love Song” emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, the author brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism. Author Ira Dworkin is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University who specializes in African American and African Diaspora literature, American literature and culture, race and ethnicity studies, and transnational literatures. After Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Dworkin’s current book project is focused on two autobiographies published by African Muslim and American Civil War soldier Nicholas Said in 1867 and 1873, tentatively titled Imperfectly Known: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative. The work will consider the place of Africa, including Islamic religious traditions, in early African American narrative by examining oral accounts within African American communities, northern literary venues like the Atlantic Monthly, and publishing in the Reconstruction-era South. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.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 his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, explores the work of 11 writers who lived in the wheatbelt of southwestern Australia. Delving into the creative writing of authors like Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Jack Davis, he helps us understand the human effects of this massive-scale agriculture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivating stories. In his meticulously conducted research, Allan Pasco argues that Honor de Balzac was not only a storyteller: he was “a sociologist avant l’heure” (113) and “a competent historian” (234). Balzac, Literary Sociologist offers a detailed analysis of more than ten literary pieces. While emphasizing Balzac’s mastery in managing plots and narratives, Allan Pasco invites his readers to pay close attention to the aspects that help reconstruct historical and sociocultural environments of nineteenth-century France. Undergoing a tumultuous period that involved a number of deep, drastic and dramatic changes, France was struggling with the rudiments of the past that were holding back the development of the country; at the same time, new developments did not effectively contribute to the construction of a stable society: a vision of the future was blurry. A conflict of the old and the young, involving a wide array of themes and motives, appears to epitomize the disruptions defining nineteenth-century French society. Poverty, corruption, ambitions of the aristocracy, despair of the poor signaled the old’s inability (and lack of willingness and desire) to implement new and productive changes; the young, on the other hand, more often than not lacked knowledge and experience to overcome stagnation. Moreover, disruptions were augmented by the loss of moral virtues: honesty, benevolence, dignity, kindness, love were often sacrificed for money that became a new god. In his analysis, Allan Pasco offers a new reading of Balzac’s works which can be considered acute and insightful commentaries on the phenomena outlining a transformational period in the history of French society. In addition to the predictable topics (class, aristocracy, church and religion, the rich and the poor, etc.), Balzac, Literary Sociologist includes insightful explorations of topics which appear to be rather symptomatic in terms of the society’s crises: suicide, failed marriages, fatherless children, the stagnation of the province and the hardships of the city life. Allan Pasco also draws attention to Balzac’s comments on life in Paris: Paris is presented as a significant locus epitomizing struggles of the country and of the individual. Undoubtedly, historical and sociocultural permutations involve not only society but the individual as well. As Allan Pasco’s research demonstrates, Balzac through his individual stories, which, at a larger scale, constitute an extensive vision of the society and the world, was responding to the historical environment that was shaping the individuals inner world. From this perspective, Balzac’s works highlight the interconnectedness of the inside and outside worlds: captivating stories are pretexts to sociological and philosophical speculations and observations. In his book, Allan Pasco states that Balzac was a sociologist and a historian: in this interview, the author adds that Balzac was “a great historian.” Balzac, Literary Sociologist proves inexhaustible potential and power of literature. Allan H. Pasco is the Hall Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Kansas. 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 book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes in the writings of Western Australian author Tim Winton. By tracing ideas of class, gender, place, landscape, and belonging in Winton’s numerous works, she demonstrates how his writing eludes easy classification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence between the two modes of return, rather than dealing with them as mutually exclusive. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know what had happened nor did they want to relive it themselves. It was just too horrible to relate. The truth about combat in those conflicts, so we are told, was therefore suppressed. In Vietnam, the truth was also suppressed, but in a different way and for altogether different reasons. As Gary Kulik demonstrates in his remarkable book ‘War Stories’: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers–What Really Happened in Vietnam (Potomac Books, 2009), some Vietnam veterans came back from the war and, far from hesitating to tell their “war stories,” exaggerated and even invented them. This was particularly true of atrocity tales, which were both numerous and well broadcast. As Kulik explains, the point of these false atrocity stories was not to portray the “grunts” in a bad light. On the contrary, the tellers of the tales portrayed themselves–with the aid of the anti-war media and what might be called the anti-war psychological establishment–as victims. Victims of what? The ‘American War Machine’ (my phrase, not Kulik’s)– a monstrous, immoral creation that ground vast quantities of men and material–American and Vietnamese–into dust for no good purpose. The ‘American War Machine,’ so Americans were told in the Winter Soldiers’ testimony, in a huge memoir literature, and in blockbuster films, produced atrocities that then in turn produced the broken, lost, and possibly insane Vietnam vet of popular folk memory. Think John Rambo or Travis Bickle. Kulik’s point is not that American soldiers committed no atrocities in Vietnam. They did, and they were too many of them. Nor is it to claim that American soldiers were not, in some cases, badly traumatized by their Vietnam experience. Some were, and too many of them. His argument is that the truth about Vietnam–that it was basically a war like others Americans have fought in the twentieth century, not one that produced a flood of atrocities and psychologically wounded soldiers–has been suppressed by those who wanted to tell politically-charged “war stories.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as well as detailed cultural and political histories of the many interactions between drugs and religion, specifically Islam. From the beginning of the book the reader expects the story to culminate in the author’s experiential encounter with a visionary plant brew called ayahuasca, indigenous to South America and now popular throughout the globe, as a portal into the spiritual world. The twists and turns leading up to this encounter give the book some amount of narrative suspense, but it’s a page-turner in any case. The reader, during her journey through Knight’s narrative, will learn about how coffee was initially banned by Muslims and how socio-economics allowed wine–although explicitly forbidden by authoritative religious texts–a status over marijuana, which was not explicitly forbidden but still seen as a drug for the lower classes. The reader also learns about philosophical debates over authority to interpret Islamic metaphysical doctrines and how the world of academia functions. That the book’s subtitle includes writing makes itself clear throughout the text as well, and readers who enjoy reflecting on the recreational as well as existential dramas of written language will find themselves gripped by Knight’s process. He wrote the book, moreover, during his transition into a PhD program in religious studies, after already making a name for himself as a successful author of several books. Because of the liminal space from which he writes Tripping with Allah, as well as its artistic precision, the book should appeal to broad audiences and Islamic studies specialists alike. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.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

Over the course of a long and adventurous life, Henry Alsberg was guided by the constancy of his passion for radical causes. This focus, as Susan Rubenstein DeMasi makes clear in Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland, 2016) defined both his varied career choices and his greatest achievements. Alsbeg’s radicalism was a constant of his life from an early age, and led him to abandon his initial employment as a lawyer for more fulfilling work as a journalist and author. After several years in revolution-plagued eastern Europe as a correspondent during and after the First World War, Alsberg returned to the United States to become a theater producer. Despite the success of his English-language translation of the play The Dybbuk, by the time the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s Alsberg was facing the same challenges as millions of other Americans in finding work. Not only did the New Deals Federal Writers’ Project provide him with employment but, as DeMasi demonstrates, with projects such as the multivolume American Guide and the compiling of the oral histories of former slaves he shepherded some of the most enduring cultural legacies of the era, ones which serve as monuments to his own blend of political values and artistic creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies