"The American Scholar" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie Bastek
26m
·
New Books in Literary Studies
·
Stephanie Bastekhas been withThe American Scholarfor 10 years, where she is now senior editor. She hosts and produces the magazine’sSmarty Pantspodcast, with has just returned with a new miniseries called “Exploding the Canon” about the student protests at her alma mater, Reed College, over the mandatory freshmen humanities course eight years ago. The American Scholar plays a unique role in the literary-journalism realm: its writings often offer a response to newsworthy events but may do through an interdisciplinary approach that weaves in history or literature, for example, and aims to be far-ranging and reflective. In this episode, the first essay we focus on is Hugh Martin’s “Shooting a Dog” from the Winter 2024 issue. Set in Iraq, it invokes a parallel to George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” set in what was then called Burma. In each case, the supposedly superior Westerner fears being seen as a fool by those he lords over. Similar tensions involving masculine pride, patriotism, and more, surface here. A second essay being covered is “The Lives of Bryan” by Jennifer Sinor from the Summer 2023 issue. The author’s brother has had four previous brushes with death, before a heart attack ends his life. A distraught father’s insistence that what Bryan has hoarded in his mobile equates to “throwing away a piece of your brother,” brings up issues of loss, transience, and the uncertain vagaries we all try to navigate as best we can. “An Outrage Sacred to the Gods” by Greg Afinogenov from the Winter 2024 issue explores his father’s death, and the role of alcoholism as a death wish that the author struggles to overcome in his own life. With “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Patricia Hampl from the Spring 2023 issue, being an outsider is front and center. Hampl has made a pilgrimage to visit a close associate of the writer Katherine Mansfield, only to be rebuffed, leading to a more fruitful connection with her guide for the occasion, an editor whose “pure homosexual” accent places him, like his American visitor, outside England’s class structure. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leadsSensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
The episode "The American Scholar" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie Bastek from the podcast New Books in Literary Studies has a duration of
26:18. It was first published
More episodes from New Books in Literary Studies
Nuzhat Abbas, "River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation" (Trace Press, 2023)
What are the histories, constraints, and possibilities of language in relation to bodies, origins, land, colonialism, gender, war, displacement, desire, and migration? Moving across genres, memories, belongings, and borders,River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation(Trace Press, 2023) invites readers to consider translation as a form of ethical and political love—one that requires attentive regard of an other and a making and unmaking of self.“River in an Ocean, as the title implies, blurs borders between self and others, between translators and their subjects, inscribing the process of translation…on the page.”–Ibrahim Fawzy,Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. In this episode, Ibrahim and Nuzhat Abbasdiscuss translation as “decolonial feminist work” and the process of editing this volume, which includesessays by poets, writers, and translators. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Shakespeare in America
James Shapiro spoke at the Institute in 2014 aboutShakespeare in America, the anthology he edited for the Library of America. He is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Shapiro is the author of many books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare in a Divided America, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction. In addition, he is the author ofRival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare(1991);Shakespeare and the Jews(1996);Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play(2000); 1599:A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare(2005), which was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book published in Britain; andContested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?(2010). His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. He is currently Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Ambereen Dadabhoy, "Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds" (Routledge, 2023)
Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds(Routledge, 2024) investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi,Ambereen Dadabhoy, Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College, argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world in which he lived. Focusing on the Muslims at the margins of Shakespeare’s works, Dadabhoy reveals that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays. In our conversation we discussed Shakespeare’s worldmaking and the social and political worlds of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman empires, famous plays, such asThe Tempest,The Merchant of Venice,Twelfth Night, andOthello, the figure of the “Moor,” and the threat of turning “Turk,” the intersection of race and geography in Shakespeare’s works, disrupting Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia through critical reading, and Muslim adaptations of Shakespeare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, "How to Love in Sanskrit" (HarperCollins, 2024)
How to Love in Sanskrit(HarperCollins, 2024)is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers. How do you brew a love potion? Turn someone crimson with a compliment? How do you make love? How do you quarrel and make up? Nurse a broken heart? And how do you let go? There's something for everyone in this brilliantly translated ancient guide to love for modern readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
"Orion" Magazine: A Discussion with Sumanth Prabhaker
Sumanth Prabhakeris the editor-in-chief ofOrionand the founding editor of Madra Press. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for the journalEcotone. Founded in 1982, Orion has evolved as a magazine over the years from the quieter, reverential environmental sensitivity that continues to distinguish it into also a wider awareness of global injustices that especially impact the Global South. In this episode, three essays were discussed that under his leadership, Sumanth Prabhaker nurtured into existence over a span that sometimes stretched into years. First among them is “How the Lark Got Her Crest” by Marianne Jay Erhardt from the Summer 2023 issue. It works from the slightest of bases, the few lines of Aesop’s fable about a lark, into a rather profound piece about how one might bury one’s father “in your head’ like the lark does. Language and honoring one’s parent becomes the grounding in this case. Second up, “The Other Bibles” by Katrina Vanderberg from the Spring 2024 issue began as almost a lark: why not include a book review of The Bible in a special issue devoted to religious rituals? The essay is at once a memorial to a husband who died of AIDS as a result of poorly monitored blood transfusions meant to help treat his hemophilia, as well as exploring the spiritual ecology of texts that come to us via illustrations in Bibles or the handiwork of the Earth itself. Third, the episode concludes by discussing “Natural Selection” by Erica Berry from the Winter 2023 issue. A Tinder ad about dating practices led into a piece on romance and even four Romance novels also written during the Year Without a Summer in 1916 when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia caused famine and disease and led, among other output, to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley setting to work onFrankenstein. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leadsSensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies