New Books in Literary Studies

In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty explores such tropes as the crowd in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; slums in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; and death in Michael Ondaatje’s book Anil’s Ghost, amongst others. The focus on the stereotype’s enticing explanatory power casts fresh light on some of the most important contemporary works of South Asian literature and the book is a pleasurable yet challenging read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism centered on Prague as both a physical location and the “magic capital” in the imagination of leading surrealists such as Andre Breton and Paul Aluard, Sayer takes the reader on a thematic journey from the beginning of the 20th century to the immediate post-war era. In this interview, Sayer talks about why surrealism – and, more importantly, why Prague – is central to understanding the 20th century and modernism. Through works of literature and works of architecture, Sayer demonstrates how Czech modernists pluralized visions of what modernist art should be. These Czech artists and architects were largely ignored in post-World War II exhibitions and histories of surrealism and modernism. With this book, Derek Sayer returns them to their proper place in the narrative. Prague, Capital of Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013) received the 2014 George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since the Renaissance. The book also received an honorable mention for the 2014 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded to the “most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences,” by The Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015) focuses particularly on what Rojas calls “homesickness,” a condition wherein “a node of alterity is structurally expelled from an individual or collective body in order to symbolically reaffirm the perceived coherence of that same body.” (vii) Sickness and disease, here, are not just signs of weakness and instability, but are also potential sources of dynamic transformation. In three major parts of the book set in three years – 1906, 1967, and 2006 – Rojas places immunology, biomedicine, literature, and film into a conversation that spans the work of Richard Dawkins; writers Liu E, Ng Kim Chew, Zeng Pu, Jin Tianhe, Lu Xun, Hu Fayun, Yan Lianke, and Yu Ha; immunologist Élie Metchnikoff; and directors King Hu, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia Zhangke (among many others). In each case, Homesickness contextualizes literary work within a broader historical context that allows readers to understand the relationships between contemporary tropes – or memes – of Self and Other as they manifest in concerns about healthy and sick bodies at many different scales. It’s well worth reading for those interested in Chinese literature or film, the history and literature of biomedicine, and/or the ways that discourses of immunology and modernity have mutually shaped one another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership. For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel, an Associate Professor at Duquesne University, reveals that–from its incendiary beginnings–modernism was made safe for the bourgeois West thanks to the intervention of unlikely contributors like the CIA, the Department of State, and even major corporations. Barnhisel’s extensive archival research unearths the thinking that went into the repurposing of modernism to support American cold-war ideology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand the Polish language of the performances. In The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (Anthem Press, 2014), Magda Romanska bridges the disciplinary divides between theater studies and Slavic studies, between the history of Poland in the twentieth century and the history of avant-garde theatre, to place these works in a Polish and international context. Romanska asserts that critics and audiences in West, while appreciating the theater productions of Grotowski’s Akropolis and Kantor’s Dead Class, missed the “obscure, difficult, multi-layered, funny-sounding Polish glory, with all of the complex and convoluted contextual and textual details” of these works. She traces the Polish cultural and literary roots and the Jewish history and culture on which Kantor and Grotowsky drew. She also reveals how Polish audiences would have understood words, images and actions in these productions differently than audiences in the United States, France or Germany. In doing so, The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor contributes to a deeper understanding of post-war Poland, its troubled engagement with the Holocaust and treatment of Polish Jewish citizens, and its interaction with the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ruminative thinker and meticulous writer. These traits pay dividends in the surprising insights of his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), which reframes total war and literature in the interwar years and in the present moment. The book’s articulation of the partiality of total war, especially its focus on violence committed in the so-called periphery–which denies civilians the protections of officially declared war–is all too familiar in the present. Tense Future, like the texts it examines, defamiliarizes works we thought we knew well. It also makes strange some of the familiar narratives within the field of modernist studies, like that concerning the genre of the Modern Epic. Tense Future decouples encyclopedic form from the modern epic, showing how the encyclopedia inspired interwar writers to playfully wrest totality out of the suffocating grip of total war. Saint-Amour’s boldest claim, that we live in perpetual interwar, sutures the drone attacks of the present to air-war theories developed after the zeppelin raids of WWI. Our own future, though not foreclosed, is nonetheless subject to the aperture of the past. Tense Future reminds us of futures past in order to pry open a little room for hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a feminist-sociological analysis of the soft pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, and its two sequels written by E.L. James, began as fan fiction and subsequently reached record-breaking sales as an e-book. With two central characters, a sexual ingenue and a powerful enigmatic anti-hero, the novel is poorly written and formulaic, yet managed to capture the imagination of millions of women. Illouz tells us how the novel was the perfect combination of fantasy and self-help delivered to an audience increasingly confuse and uncertain in negotiating their heterosexual relationships. With its sadomasochistic sex and images of female submission and male dominance, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a gothic romance adapted to modern sexual dilemmas and emotional confusion. Combining the romantic fantasy and self-help genres, it acts a catalyst for renegotiating heterosexual relationships. By placing the novel within the history of the commodification of the book, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and the sociology of sexuality, Illouz locates Fifty Shades of Grey in the contemporary context. The reader of Hard-Core Romance will find an intriguing argument for why after feminism and the sexual revolution dominance and submission, resistance and surrender, remain as enigmas of modern relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) he has given us a lucid and beautifully written history of the transatlantic relationships among the circle of radical writers that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gilbert Imlay. Caught in the fervor revolutionary change, these free thinkers believing in the goodness of humanity and reason rejected the need for authority, hierarchies, and tradition in preserving social cohesion and wellbeing. Rather, mutuality and open exchange were offered as a better foundation for society. At the intersection of public lives and private desire, they sought to extend their radical vision beyond politics and into their intimate lives through new a model of egalitarian and free relationships between men and women. Deconstructing marriage their writings reflected the protested against the constraints of conventional society. Cayton demonstrates how these radicals embodied a modern interpersonal ethic arising with the liberal free trade in goods and ideas in which the personal was political. How the sexes were to relate to each other changed forever. Differing gendered understanding of “social commerce,” between men and women, brought uneven consequences. Relationships founded on freedom, openness and devoid of binding ties beyond reasoned desire could also produce the fruits of a masculinist frame of mind – the tragedy of neglect, abuse, and abandonment experienced by women. Cayton’s portrait of Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Imlay changes how we read them and how we understand our modern selves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies