Tag: print culture

Reading

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Reading

Swati Moitra explains how reading can be a subversive and even revolutionary act in certain socio-historical contexts. She draws especially from her own work in the history of women’s reading practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century India, in particular the region of Bengal. She talks about the dual indices of literacy and pleasure in her work, and its affiliations to fields like book history and print cultural studies.

Swati Moitra (M.Phil., Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Gurudas College, University of Calcutta. Her areas of interest include book history and histories of readership. She is the recipient of the SHARP Research Development Grant for BIPOC Scholars 2022.

Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu



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9/11 Family Novel

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Saronik chats with Jay Shelat about the 9/11 family novel. They discuss how the attacks (re)dynamized constructions and perceptions of family.

Jay refers to a few 9/11 family novels, including Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you want a list of more 9/11 family novels, feel free to ask. A special shoutout to Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel for ideas about the state of print culture.

Jay is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he is writing his dissertation about 9/11 and the family. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Critic, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @jshelat1.

Image: photo taken by Ben Hider at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Music used in promotional material: Adagio (mother nature’s sleep) by Dee Yan-Kay

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Institutions

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Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies.

Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.

We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2011), and Janice Radway’s books, Reading the Romance (UNC Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books (UNC Press, 1997).

Chad quotes several texts referenced by Rosen:
Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 2005)
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1982)
Mark McGurl. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–349.

In the longer version of our conversation, Chad gave several other examples of the “institutional turn” including: James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP, 2005); Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007); John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2010); Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (U Chicago Press, 2008); Jim Collins Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2010).

Chad is a friend of the pod! He writes about fact checking and literature, and he’s a postdoc in the English Department at NYU.

Today’s image is a photograph of the “Staircase of the National Museum of Slovenia” taken by Petar Milošević, posted under a creative commons attribution share-alike license on Wikimedia Commons.

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