New Books in Literary Studies

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark Andryczyk’s research offers an insightful analysis of Ukrainian literature that was taking shape right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the emergence of Ukraine as an independent state. The Ukrainian literary scene of the 1990s was to some extent responding to a new political and social environment, revealing, and at times instigating, paradigmatic transformations. Becoming open to the West after almost seventy years of international isolation, Ukraine appeared to be building dialogues that involved identity and self-identification concerns locally and globally. In this process of awakened nationalconsciousness, which undoubtedly entailed a number of controversies, Andryczyk identifies a hero that communicates a diversity of searches and pursuits in the realm of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, etc. The intellectual, as the author argues, is a hero that gives a unique tint to the Ukrainian literature of the 1990s: although present in the literary scenes of other time periods, the intellectual acquires a stronger and a more eloquent voice in the 1990s. In his research, Andryczyk discerns a few types of the intellectual: The Swashbuckling Performer, The Ambassador to the West, The Sick Soul. Although distinct, their voices intermingle and echo each other: they may agree and/or argue with each other but they all mark an unrestrained impetus to make themselves heard. After decades of propaganda control, establishment suppression, and Communist Party’s directions for artists, in post-Soviet Ukraine writers were seeking ways to exercise their freedom to write and to think. The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction is an in-depth investigation of how a text/narrative responds to a changing environment; how an artist finds a way amidst a captivating chaos in order to discover his/her truth and create a world of subtle harmony–fragile and yet vital. Mark R. Andryczyk teaches Ukrainian literature at the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He also administers the Ukrainian Studies at the Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (Columbia University). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers and traces a transnational post-Holocaust network. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of Yiddish and Jewish cultures in the post-War era. 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

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) looks carefully at the work of Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, brothers and late-Qing writers of fiction and other forms. Widmer contextualizes that work within a larger frame of the lives and writing of their parents, associates, and (in one case) children, weaving together seemingly-disparate literary and historical threads in order to create a richly detailed and evocative account from sometimes-fragmentary evidence. The result is a riveting contribution to the studies of women, gender, fiction, and reform in modern China. Over the course of our conversation we spoke of the particular challenges and opportunities offered by the kinds of sources that Widmer worked with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety. Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts. 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 Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers. She examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with topics such as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences. By bringing an in depth look at ideas of Jewishness into dialogue with postcolonial analysis this book makes an important intellectual contribution. 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

Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K. Elder lives in Oak Park, and for the colorful and interesting Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (Kent State University Press, 2016), he and his co-authors Aaron Vetch and Mark Cirino dug into multiple locations of the Hemingway archives. The legendary author’s life was as big as his fiction, and Elder and the documents preserved in the writer’s hometown help tell his story. Garrison Keillor said of the book, “Ernest Hemingway was the genuine literary giant of my youth: we groundlings studied him closely, we imitated and then we parodied him, we admired the fine figure he cut and envied his celebrity, and now fifty years later, it’s a privilege to look through his closet and read his stuff and discover him as a mortal man.” From ancestral documents and photos to Hemingway’s early prose, love letters, yearbook pages and more, a thorough picture of the writer emerges. Elder and podcast host Gael Fashingbauer Cooper discuss the most enlightening, surprising and shocking archival discoveries, as well as how Hemingway’s most famous dig at his hometown was probably never said by him at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Benjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’s literary endeavors as an aberration born of financial necessity, in his book Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Robert O’Kell presents the novels as key to understanding his inner life and how he conceptualized his political career. Beginning with his participation in publisher John Murray’s attempt in the 1820s to establish a rival newspaper to The Times, O’Kell uses Disraeli’s novels and other writings to illuminate his self-image, one defined by his Jewish ancestry and his own intellectual and rhetorical gifts. Though convinced of his own genius, Disraeli had to overcome both anti-Semitic slurs and the stigma gained as the author of gossipy “silver-fork” novels to win election to Parliament and to become the leader of the Conservative Party. Many of his novels reflect his efforts to work out those challenges for himself, serving as a chronicle of his continuing attempts to come to terms with his identity within the context of the society and politics of his era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) explores the entanglement of literature, religion, and community in China. Thunder rituals were used to capture unruly and uncanonical spirits that enthrall local communities and to transform them into sacred beings aligned with cultural institutions that transcend any single locality or region. These rituals were part of a Daoist liturgical structure that was supported by early Ming emperors, and they helped shape the story and significance of Canonization of the Gods. Meulenbeld situates this focused case within larger contexts of Ming imperial politics and culture, and explores larger themes that include the history and nature of modern conceptions of the novel and of fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst, explores the role of Jews in the history of obscenity in America. Through a series of case studies, he shows how Jews battled censorship as writers, editors, publishers, critics, and lawyers. In their engagements in battles over obscenity, Jews have played a previously underappreciated role in transforming American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources, in terms their authority to make sense of the Qur’an. What does it mean, for example, when a particular Qur’an commentary mentions a hadith with women in the isnad, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional? Were they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Geissinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis in hadith compilations, and literature on the virtues of the Qur’an among other topics all the while engaging with a rich breadth of modern and premodern scholarship, ranging from Bukhari to Judith Butler. The footnotes are extensive, the prose is clear, and the book well-organized. The monograph will likely appeal to a number of disciplines, especially Islamic history, Qur’anic studies, and gender studies. 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, Qur’anic 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