New Books in Literary Studies

Erin Khue Ninh is the author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York University Press, 2011), which in 2013, won the Literary Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Ingratitude investigates the figure of the daughter in Asian American literature, which has lately been dismissed as a figure that downplays political and historical conflict by fulfilling model minority achievement. Ninh responds to this view by seeing the immigrant family as a form of capitalist enterprise, and thus the Asian American daughter as a locus of conflicting power. Through literary analyses of texts by Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Evelyn Lau and others, Ninh explores the figure of the Asian American daughter as a debtor, whose obligation to the parents are always designated to fail, and whose rebellion comes in the form of sexual freedom and through the act of writing itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics and politics were deeply intertwined in these authors’ representations of a crisis of French civilization and in the antisemitic, racist, and misogynist responses they articulated. Figures like Maurice Blanchot and Louis-Ferdinand Celine were some of the most famous members of an intellectual movement that elaborated an “aesthetics of hate” in which Jews, women, and homosexuals figured as emblems of decadence and decline. The book also traces in fascinating ways some of the crucial links between French anti-Semitism and imperialism, examining connections between metropolitan and colonial racisms. While Sanos is careful to point out that hers is not a history of fascism per se, The Aesthetics of Hate makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the far-right in France and beyond. The book illuminates the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in modern France, as well as the fundamental interdependence of French culture and politics through the twentieth century. An archaeology of some of the more repugnant political ideas of the 1930s, the book also has broader implications for our understanding of contemporary French expressions of cultural anxiety, racism, and hateful politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We all know the commonplace that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. After reading Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), I’m inclined to extend this wisdom to titles. Though accurate, Metawritings doesn’t capture the storytelling power that editor Jill Talbot gathers in this collection of essays and interviews by thirteen fiction and nonfiction writers. In it, you’ll find a piece by Robin Hemley that opens, “It’s my first full day in Prague, and I desperately want to find someone to pickpocket me.” Or this one by Sarah Blackman that begins, “Once a person has been a girl, it’s hard to write about the subject.” You’ll find a pithy investigation into dating and a poignant account of a son reckoning with an estranged, ageing father. You’ll find writers in pursuit of Janis Joplin and going on blind dates, writers wrestling with the soul-crushing ugliness of Las Vegas and exploring the exotic dangers of Adventure Island. You’ll discover whether or not there’s a dog at the end of the world. And yet Talbot’s title does do import work, because it alerts us to the artistic and even existential investigations that drive these pieces. “Metawriting” is writing that reflects on its own nature as writing, that calls attention to itself as an artificial creation. Metawriting makes the writer’s often invisible hand visible. You might think of Tristram Shandy in his Life and Opinions, constantly belaboring the fact that he can’t get on with the telling of his life, or Hamlet, waxing about the nature of players and playing, in the play that bears his name. Here, however, the genre is nonfiction, so the pieces in Metawritings strike at questions that involve us all. What’s a fact? What’s a lie? What’s at stake if I don’t know or can’t tell the difference? Who is this person that, most days, I think of as me? And how do all those ways I present myself to others, whether I’m face-to-face or on Facebook, capture who I am? To say it in a more “meta-” manner, just how do we go about making selves out of ourselves? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, translation studies, and world literature. Comprising 100 chapters rendered across five volumes, including more than 800 named characters and supported by more than 4,000 endnotes, Roy’s work is a massive accomplishment of textual analysis, writing, research, and translation. Luckily for readers, it’s also a huge pleasure to read. If you, Gentle Reader, are anything like me, you will regularly pause in your poring over the pages of The Plum in the Golden Vase to admire the subtlety and deftness with which Roy has chosen render vernacular Chinese into corresponding English prose, whether one of the characters is claiming to be “a real dingdong dame” or another is being called a “ridiculous blatherskite.” (Blatherskite!) Yes, there is a great deal of explicit sexual description in the work, but it’s a treasure-house of so much more than that, including detailed descriptions of aspects of daily life in the late 16th century that cover everything from food preparation to medicinal recipes to funerary procedures. It was a deep honor, and a pleasure, to talk with David Roy about his masterwork. I hope you enjoy listening to him and reading his translation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken, 2013) offers readers an encounter with the great Yiddish author himself. Dauber writes in the rhythm of the language of Sholem Aleichem – Mr. How Do You Do – brilliantly structuring the book as a drama, with an overture, five acts, and an epilogue in ten scenes. He assumes the voice of a theater impresario, talking to his audience, just as the author Sholem Aleichem did, narrating his stories and reading them to the crowds whom he loved to entertain. The author Sholem Aleichem, most famous for his Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, was no Tevye, but rather a sophisticated and educated cosmopolitan businessman and writer.  He possessed immense curiosity about every man, a unique ear for interesting stories, and the ability to connect with his audience; these talents ultimately united his life with Tevye’s. Although he could very well write in Russian and Hebrew, ultimately he chose Yiddish, the most natural language of the people whom he loved, to tell his universal stories of tradition confronting modernity and the struggles of people to deal with change. Read this engaging and very well written book to learn more about Sholem Aleichem and fall in love with this man and his writings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013). Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what she would later write in The Bell Jar. The summer is of not just biographical interest, but literary significance as well. There is about Pain, Parties, Work an inevitable sense of clouds brewing- the summer will end, Plath will return home, and she will attempt suicide by taking pills and crawling under her mother’s house- but there’s also a sensation of joy: the joy of young women alone in a big city, experimenting with boys and clothes and make-up and work. Pain, Parties, Work is bolstered by the fact that Winder was able to secure interviews with many of Plath’s fellow interns, voices that have been notably absent in many of the earlier accounts and which lend an immediacy to a well-known story. The interviews with these women do much to flesh out the concrete details of the experience as well as Plath’s unique struggles within it. The Plath we have here is young and eager, fond of make-up and boys, and already displaying a rare gift for words. The clouds are on the horizon, yes- we all know that- but, in the meantime, the city and the thrill of discovery provide an intoxicating distraction. Summer is a time in which anything can happen. Reading Winder’s narrative and meeting Plath in this context, one feels that keenly: the excitement of a girl in the city, the hope and heat of New York, an electricity in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of Chinese history. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013) explores the modern history of a single Catholic town in Shanxi called Cave Gully by weaving together some of the most important tales and memories of its inhabitants. Through this very local story of lived religious practice, Harrison challenges dominant global histories of Christianity. In contrast to narratives that tell a story of a Christian religion that was alien to Chinese contexts and acculturated or adapted in order t o compensate for this incommensurability, Harrison’s book instead shows the significant commonalities between Christianity and Chinese religious culture and argues that the differences between Catholic practice and local folk religion have actually increased over the centuries. Each chapter of the book begins with a folktale told by the villagers of Cave Gully, following its themes and events through an archive of written sources. The chapters collectively explore a wide range of issues, including local/missionary relations, the challenges and opportunities posed by long-distance travel in the 19thcentury, the economics of global Christianity, local encounters with the Boxer Uprising, and much more. Harrison shows how people of Cave Gully gradually came to see themselves as part of a global organization, examining the consequences of this transformation within the town and well beyond it. In addition to all of this, it’s also a darn good story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For instance, the past week has brought the release of new memoirs by Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes and Olympic rower Katherine Grainger, as well as books by Dave Hanson, one the Hanson brothers of the cult hockey film Slap Shot, and some guy named Ace Cacchiotti, the keeper of the film archive of old NFL games. We also find in these stacks some of the most acclaimed sports books ever written, like Ken Dryden’s The Game, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James, to name just a few. Yes, sports memoirs can be tedious rehearsals of sports platitudes. But, as we learn in this episode, there are quite a few that offer vivid perspectives and thoughtful reflections on the games we watch. In this special seminar episode of New Books in Sports we take a close look at sports memoirs. We learn about the art of the fan memoir from Dave Roberts, author of the acclaimed books 32 Programmes and The Bromley Boys, and from John Harms, founder and editor of the Footy Almanac, a popular site for fan writing in Australia. Literary scholar James Pipkin looks at the themes and literary devices common to the autobiographies of American athletes, while historian Robert Edelman tells us what he finds in the memoirs of sport stars from the old Soviet Union. We get recommendations of favorite sports memoirs from Glasgow journalist Teddy Jamieson and historians of British sport Victoria Dawson and Daryl Leeworthy. Meanwhile, Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth tells us why he’s not a fan of athlete autobiographies. We hear from Sharda Ugra, senior editor at ESPN Cricinfo, about her experiences as a ghostwriter. And long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox talks about researching and writing her books, including her best-selling memoir Swimming to Antarctica. As with our other seminar episodes–on European football, the Olympics, and sports books for children–this is twice the length of a normal edition of New Books in Sports. But with more smart guests, and more sharp insights, and more good books, it’s worth a listen.  Consider it a crash course in sports literature–packed into less time than the game of the week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies