New Books in Literary Studies

• Writing Against the System

  We kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and co-producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, and she explains how the novel can mark the invisible infrastructures of the internet, defamiliarize the “computational surround” of everyday life, and give us new angles on writing with and against bots. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 9 of Novel Dialogue and to find out what Aarthi's students say when asked: "What would you never automate even if you could?" Mentions -Jennifer Egan: “Black Box” -Teju Cole: Small Fates, Tremor -Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts -Stewart Home -Tom McCarthy: Satin Island -Yxta Maya Murray: Art Is Everything -Fred Benenson -Xu Bing: Book from the Ground -Rachel Cusk: Transit Naomi Alderman -R.F. Kuang: Yellowface -Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You -Sheila Heti, “According to Alice” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Ofra Amihay, "The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel" (Syracuse UP, 2022)

  In The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel (Syracuse UP, 2022), Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography--both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images-- Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans. Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Colby Gordon, "Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

  Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers a prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.  In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology.  Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery. In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative acco unt of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Chance E. Bonar, "The Author in Early Christian Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

  While scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature have focused their efforts heavily on explaining why authors would write pseudonymously or anonymously, less time has been spent exploring why an author would write orthonymously (that is, under their own name). The Author in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores how early Christian writers began to care deeply about 'correct' attribution of both Christian and non-Christian literature for their own apologetic purposes, as well as how scholars have overlooked the function that orthonymity plays in some early Christian texts. Orthonymity was not only a decision made by a writer regarding how to attribute one's own writings, but also how to classify other writers' texts based on proper or improper attribution. This Element urges us to examine forms of authorship that are often treated as an unexamined default, as well as to more robustly consider when, how, for whom, and for what purposes an instance of authorial attribution is deemed 'correct. New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review Chance Bonar is a postdoc at Tufts University. Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Action Without Hope

  In his new book, Nathan K. Hensley describes a mood or a vibe or an intuitive response to the contemporary moment when one feels powerless in the face of collapsing societal systems. Given the entrenched nature of the present crisis, with compulsory happiness being marketed by the culture industry, how does one work within systems from which no true escape is possible? In order to uncover a prehistory of this feeling, he goes back to the nineteenth century - to artists like J.M.W. Turner and writers like Emily Bronte and Christina Rossetti who were thinking about what it means to inhabit a world omnivorously captured by capital. Nathan K. Hensley is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016), and co-editor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2018). With Devin Garofalo, he is currently coediting a collection of essays that's forthcoming from Northwestern UP, The Barbara Johnson Collective. His new book is Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, forthcoming from Chicago UP in April 2025. He was born in Fresno, California and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Image: J.M.W. Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1834-35. Public Domain. Original at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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