New Books in Literary Studies

Seamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book wasMaking History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative(Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies. In this interview he discusses his new book,Irish Culture and "The People": Populism and Its Discontents(Oxford UP, 2022),a study of the rhetoric of populism and uses of the seemingly simple concept “The People” in Irish political and literary discourse. Irish Culture and ‘The People’argues that populism has been a shaping force in Irish literary culture. Populist moments and movements have compelled authors to reject established forms and invent new ones. Sometimes, as in the middle period of W.B. Yeats's work, populism forces a writer into impossible stances, spurring ever greater rhetorical and poetic creativity. At other times, as in the critiques of Anna Parnell or Myles na gCopaleen, authors penetrate the rhetoric fog of populist discourse and expose the hollowness of its claims. Yet in both politics and culture, populism can be a generative force. Daniel O'Connell, and later the Land League, utilized populist discourse to advance Irish political freedom and expand rights. The most powerful works of Lady Gregory and Ernie O'Malley are their portraits of The People that borrows from the populist vocabulary. While we must be critical of populist discourse, we dismiss it at our loss. This study synthesizes existing scholarship on populism to explore how Irish texts have evoked "The People"--a crucial rhetorical move for populist discourse--and how some writers have critiqued, adopted, and adapted the languages of Irish populisms. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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

Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art.Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures(UP of Mississippi, 2016)examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader--or listener or viewer, as the case may be--is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other. The analyzed comics, extending from famous to lesser known works, include Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy, Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches, Hugo Pratt's The Ballad of the Salty Sea, Edmond Baudoin's The Voyage, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Moebius's Arzach, Yslaire's Cloud 99 series, and Jarmo Mäkilä's Taxi Ride to Van Gogh's Ear. Dr. Maaheen Ahmedis associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University, Belgium. Dr. Ahmed is the primary investigator of the COMICS Project, which is focused on the intercultural history of children and comics. Dr. Ahmed is author ofMonstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in ComicsandOpenness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures, both published by University Press of Mississippi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature mavenPaige Reynoldsand ND hostJohn Plotz. She reads fromThe Wren, The Wren(Norton, 2023)and discusses the “etherized” state of our inner lives as they circulate on social media. Anne says we don't yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”--though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos...is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (AlthoughThe Wren The Wrenharbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they're "just Irish." Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want--while simultaneously “mortifying them...condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.” Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’sNow We are Six. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry(Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social and natural environment, shaping their capacity to act, think, and feel. Tana Jean Welch demonstrates how contemporary American poetry is specifically poised to develop a pathway toward a posthuman intervention in biomedicine, the field of medical humanities, medical discourse, and the value systems that guide U.S. healthcare in general. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

InWays of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation(U California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves. Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction,Shiamin Kwa’sPerfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic(Rutgers UP, 2023)reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell.Perfect Copiesconsiders the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comicsMy Favorite Thing Is Monstersby Emil Ferris,The Black Projectby Gareth Brookes,The Generous Bosomseries by Conor Stechschulte,Sabrinaby Nick Drnaso, andPantherby Brecht Evens,Perfect Copiesshows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers. Dr. Shiamin Kwais Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. Her written work explores relationships between form and content, text and image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and narrative theory. Her published articles analyze a broad variety of topics, including Italian opera, contemporary Chinese literature, and North American and European graphic narratives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Following Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,'Drawing from the Archivesconsiders comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time. Dr. Benoît Crucifixis assistant professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven and researcher at the Royal Library of Belgium, working on the FED-tWIN “Pop Heritage” project. The aim of the project is to valorize collections of popular print culture. He is interested in the cultural practices that move and reframe existing comics in a variety of contexts and settings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated.On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy(University of Toronto Press, 2023) analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred between different social groups and settings. Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late mediaeval Italy. Instead, it was an ambiguous term to be deployed strategically, describing a wide range of social relationships such as allies, collaborators, servants, patrons, rivals, and enemies. Drawing on the use of the language of friendship in the letters, correspondence poems, dedications, narratives, and treatises composed by Dante and his interlocutors, Dr. Coggeshall examines the way they skillfully negotiated around the dilemmas that friendship raised in the spheres of mediaeval Italian literary society. The book addresses instances of inclusivity and exclusivity, collaboration and self-interest, hierarchy and equality, and alterity and identity. Employing literary, historical, and sociological analysis,On Amistàpresents a genealogy for the innovative and tactical use of the terms of friendship among the works of late mediaeval Italian authors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whoseforthcoming bookfocuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When I decided to try my hand at interviewing authors for the New Books Network, one of my dream guests was Steve Mentz. Steve’s work in the environmental humanities marries a rigorous archival work, pathbreaking close readings, and a fluent and innovative approach to scholarly writing. I think he’s charted a course for early modern ecocriticism that has been both impressive and energizing. Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University. He has produced numerous books that have shaped the emerging field of the blue humanities, includingShipwreck Modernity;At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean; the Bloomsbury Objects entryOcean; and the recentAn Introduction to the Blue Humanities. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Swim Poems. His Bookfish blog is also a wonderful index for scholarly and creative work happening right now. Today, I am excited to discuss his most recent book of blue poetry,Sailing Without Ahab, just published by Fordham University Press in 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies