New Books in Literary Studies

Alexander R. GallowayView on Amazon"The chief aim of [philosopher François Laruelle's] life's work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so." What is non-philosophy, what would it look like to practice it, and what are the implications of doing so? Alexander R. Galloway introduces and explores these questions in a vibrant and thoughtful new book. Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) uses François Laruelle's non-philosophy as a foundation for considering the philosophical concept of digitality. In a series of ten chapters (plus intro and conclusion) and 14 theses, Galloway offers an exceptionally clear and provocative treatment of digitality as a way of thinking about and with difference. In addition to offering a critical encounter with some of the most fundamental aspects of Laruelle's work as they open up ways of thinking about identity, distinction, and exchange, the book also contains some wonderful discussions of brightness and obscurity, representation and aesthetics, computation, photography, music, ethics, and capitalism, while putting the work of Laruelle into dialogue with Deleuze, Badiou, Marx, Althusser, and others. It's an exciting work, and I will be re-reading and thinking with it for some time to come.

Wilt IdemaView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Wilt Idema's new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life and wreaks all sorts of havoc in the lives of those around him. (In some versions, Zhuang instead comes across a grieving widow and becomes enmeshed in series of misadventures upon trying to help her.) The chapters of the book introduce and present three texts from the seventeenth-century, two short ballads from the nineteenth century or later, and one modern story by Lu Xun, all adaptations and variations of the story of Zhuang and the skeleton. While working through these masterful (and occasionally quite humorous) translations, readers also learn about different genres of texts that have embodied this story over time, from Ming narrative daoqing (sentiments of the Way) texts that incorporated poems, prose passages, and more; to youth books (zidishu, or "bannermen tales"); to precious scrolls (baojuan) meant especially to appeal to women; to satirical one-act dramas, and beyond. The Resurrected Skeleton is a gripping and brilliantly translated set of stories, equally suited to the research scholar, the pleasure-reader, and the teacher who might be on the lookout for excellent primary source translations for use in a university classroom.

Tamara T. ChinView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Tamara Chin's new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE), Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) carefully considers how this earliest period of expansion of China's markets and frontiers inspired scholarly debates over the relationships of frontier, market, word, and world. In a series of three chapters that each treat a discursive genre (philosophical dialogue, epideictic fu, and historiography) and two chapters that look at social practices (kinship and money), Savage Exchange traces the literary innovations that emerged within contexts of political economic debate. Chin's story reads Han literary texts in a way that uncovers and traces multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives instead of the kind of linear story that often accompanies traditional readings of these works. The book shows that the "savagery of imperialism," for many, was not about borders between the civilized and the barbarian, but instead was about modes and rituals of exchange across boundaries of gender, morality, numeracy, kinship, and materiality. Chapter 5 will be of particular interest to historians of money, and the final chapter of the book is a special treat for readers interested in the broader implications of Chin's methodology,  as it covers the importance of literary scholars engaging with the materials and texts produced by frontier archaeology, of comparative literature engaging with premodern histories of contact, and of the historiography of world systems engaging a broader set of approaches to documents and data.

View on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Law] Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes' Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes' most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates.

R. Keller KimbroughView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Buddhist Studies] In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyo and ko-joruri ("old" Japanese puppet theatre) pieces from the seventeenth century. Sekkyo was a type of publically-performed Buddhist storytelling that focused on the forces of karma and the "miraculous origins of celebrity Buddhist icons." This art was revived in the early seventeenth century, when chanters of sekkyo began using puppets in their performances in the manner of the emergent puppet theatre. Ko-joruri (lasting roughly from 1600 to 1685), on the other hand, was the earliest form of Japanese puppet theatre, and appears to have developed out of late medieval performance traditions. While we know little about how the pieces translated here were actually performed, as written works they pull the reader into a world of horror and heroism, in which we are exposed to the depths of human cruelty–child slavery, torture, senseless violence–as well as to some of humans' more redeeming qualities and the salvific (as well as destructive) powers of Buddhist divinities. In the introduction Kimbrough outlines the history of the two genres (sekkyo and ko-joruri), addresses the ways in which the two overlapped–many stories were performed both as sekkyo and ko-joruiri at different times–and discusses some of these pieces' salient characteristics. He also explains how publishing houses began to produce shohon or woodblock-printed playbooks attributed to particular chanters, thereby turning a performance genre into a literary one. Most such texts were accompanied by pictures, and Kimbrough has included fifty-three monochrome reproductions of such illustrations in Wondrous Brutal Fictions; this feature of his book provides the reader with a better sense of how seventeenth-century Japanese would have experienced printed editions of sekkyo and ko-joruri. However, one need not be particularly interested in sekkyo or ko-joruri (or even Japanese literature for that matter) to appreciate these stories, particularly as translated here. While Japanese specialists will be better positioned to understand the cultural, religious, and literary themes appearing therein (and will be helped by footnotes throughout that alert the reader to Japanese puns that cannot be rendered into English), few readers will be able to wrench themselves away from the account of the young siblings Anju-no-hime and Zushiomaru as they suffer unspeakable horrors at the hands of Sansho Dayu and his wicked son, or fail to be moved by the tragedy of Karukaya's predicament as he contemplates whether or not to reveal his true identity to his forlorn son. Similarly, regardless of prior knowledge, all readers will marvel at the fortitude of the female characters in these stories, be elated by the characters' eventual redemption or well-deserved punishment, and find lightheartedness in the humor that punctuates the violence and sadism of these wondrous brutal fictions. This book will be particularly useful to those with interests in Japanese puppet theatre, Buddhist preaching in Japan, Edo-period literature and performance, Japanese Buddhist literature, popular Buddhist literature and performance, and the relationship between performance and text, though as already stated, the eloquence of the translations is such that few readers will not find the eight pieces thoroughly engrossing.

Jenny KaminerView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Gender Studies] Jenny Kaminer's new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the "bad mother." Her study examines how political, religious, economic, social, and cultural factors affect Russians' conception of motherhood throughout history: what motherhood is, and what it should be. Kaminer focuses on three critical periods of transformation and consolidation: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She investigates how good and bad mothers are depicted in various works of literature and culture, from Anna Karenina to media depictions of Chechen female suicide bombers in 2002. Winner of the 2014 Prize for Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Paola IoveneView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Paola Iovene's new book is a beautiful exploration of visions of the future as they have shaped a range of texts, genres, and editorial practices in Chinese literature from the middle of the twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces two different and related ideas of the future through children's books, popular science, science fiction, poetry, fiction, and other kinds of text and practice: destination (defined in the book as "a condition of higher perfection, a time and place that is better than the present"), and anticipation (rendered as "the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds" and emergent in various ways throughout the book). The first three chapters focus on editorial and authorial strategies, and the last two chapters offer close readings of texts by Wang Meng and Ge Fei that themselves are concerned with literature and its uses. The chapter offers thoughtful reflections on science fiction in China and its relation to ideas of labor, embodied practices of composition and performance, literary translation as a mode of cultural exchange, the beginnings of an idea of "world literature" in modern China, the editorial strategies and modes of collaboration responsible for the emergence of Chinese avant-garde fiction, the surprising links between Tang poetry and contemporary fiction in China, the importance of fog or haze as a literary medium of toxicity, and much else. It's a wonderfully provocative book, both for specialists of Chinese literary studies and for non-specialist readers looking for a glimpse into some wonderfully inventive works of modern Chinese literature that haven't received much critical attention in English-language scholarship.

Steven ShaviroView on Amazon[Cross-posted from the New Books Network Seminar] Steven Shaviro's new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on "object-oriented ontology" and related issues, it's also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of "correlationism" or panpsychism, don't quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren't sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a "speculative aesthetics." The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic theory to reading and engaging the work of Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux, Kant, Levinas, Bryant, and others as an ongoing conversation about how we understand, inhabit, and exist as part of a material world.  It's a fabulous (and fabulously clearly written!) work that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and students. During the course of the interview we talked a bit about the opportunities that electronic and web-based media have brought to life and work in academia. On that note, you can find Steve's blog here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/

Steven FieldingView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Critical Theory] To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don't know the exact relationship between people's political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such as The Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike.

Joshua S. MostowView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow's new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries.  Paying special attention to the relationship of image and text in these works, Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation (Brill, 2014) expertly interprets the Ise images to understand the very different ways that the stories were understood in different contexts. Courtly Visions pays careful attention to how different ways of framing class, gender, and religion shaped pre-modern reading and imaging of Ise, from a predominantly male salon in the ninth century, to aristocratic female readers of the Heian period, to a medieval courtier's poems about a love affair, to a pair of imperial lines wrestling for power, to Noh theater, and beyond. The book is gorgeously illustrated with color images that are not only an immense pleasure to look at, but also serve as an important aspect of the book's argument as Mostow guides us through visual readings of them.

Beth DriscollView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Critical Theory] It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. 'Middlebrow' is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is entrepreneurial, mediated, feminised, emotional, recreational and earnest. In the main it is situated within the tension between the aesthetic and the commercial. The book uses four case studies to explore how this tension, along with the idea of the middlebrow, plays out. In the first case study the role of Oprah Winfrey as a tastemaker and cultural intermediary is explored as part of an analysis of book clubs. The analysis shows how Oprah's book club was important in establishing markets for books as well as being a site for the struggle over what is, and what is not, legitimate taste. This legitimacy is tied to elements of the middlebrow aesthetic, which has earnestness and self improvement as an important component. This component is both the source of struggle with more elite elements of the literary field and a source of changing reading practices, for example in the way Harry Potter is used in schools. The final two case studies, of book prizes and literary festivals, add to the defence of the middlebrow as a vital form of aesthetic production and cultural consumption for both understanding the future of reading and the future of the market for literature in the era of social media.

Melek OrtabasiView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Melek Ortabasi's new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, "eccentric, dominating crackpot," "brilliant, versatile iconoclast" and much more. The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) expands how we understand and evaluate his work by contextualizing it in terms of translation studies, simultaneously informing how we think about (and with) translation. Translation was a method of resistance for Yanagita, offering a way to work against a "homogenizing national narrative" in the first half of Japan's twentieth century. Ortabasi considers Yanagita's work as a poet, a travel writer, a folk studies scholar, a linguist, and a pedagogue: in every case, whether literally or figuratively, Yanagita was also acting as a translator. The Undiscovered Country takes us into some amazing texts that include a collection of oral tales from a rural castle town in northern Japan, travelogues, methodological introductions to academic fields, works on regional dialectical names for snails (snails!), language-maps, glossaries, children's literature (including a history of fire!), a television show, and much more. It's a fascinating study for readers interested in both modern Japan and translation studies alike. Enjoy!

Wai-yee LiView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Wai-yee Li's new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice. In a series of chapters that showcase exceptionally thoughtful, virtuosic readings of a wide range of texts, Women and Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) considers how conceptions of gender mediate experiences of political disorder. The first two chapters trace, in turn, the appropriation of feminine diction by men via a poetics of indirectness, and the use of masculine diction by women as a means of creating a space for political and historical engagement. The book continues from there to consider tropes of avenging female heroes, courageous concubines and courtesans, poet-historians and female knight-errants, chastity martyrs and abducted women, massacre and redemption. The conclusions to each chapter follow these seventeenth-century threads of discourse as they continue to weave themselves into the literature of modern China.  It is a thoughtfully conceived and elegantly written study that serves simultaneously as a compellingly argued story and a reference packed with detailed readings of gorgeously translated primary texts.

Harleen SinghView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in South Asian Studies] The Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh explores four representations of the famous warrior queen who led her troops into battle against the British. Analysing her various representations – as a sexually promiscuous Indian whore, a heroic Aryan, a great nationalist and a folk symbol of indigenous resistance – the book critically discusses what wider issues are stake in these depictions of such a mythical and marginal woman.

Bridget ConorView on Amazon[Cross-Posted from New Books in Media and Communications]  Bridget Conor's new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television in the US and UK.  Situated within the critical media production studies paradigm, Screenwriting analyzes the history, current industrial practices, identities, and cultural milieu that surround this form of creative labor.  Conor examines the professional myths that are often associated with screenwriting by looking back at its history during Hollywood's golden age, beginning with the groundbreaking work of sociologist Hortense Powdermaker.  Then, utilizing theoretical frameworks developed by luminaries of media production studies such as Angela McRobbie, John T. Caldwell, and David Hesmondhalgh, Conor outlines the contemporary labor scene for screenwriters.  Through in-depth interviews with professional screenwriters, Conor underscores some of the commercial and creative tensions in the industry that often challenge these individuals' professional autonomy and claims to authorship in their work.  Lastly, Conor unveils some of the deep social inequalities that persist in this industry, many of which are unfortunately perpetuated though the numerous "how-to" manuals that serve to socialize budding screenwriters in the profession.  Screenwriting also illuminates some of the fascinating changes being wrought by the Internet on screenwriters and their sense of autonomy in a new digital world.