Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Q&A with Janelle Adsit

Janelle Adsit answered a few questions about her new book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing exposes hidden biases of the creative writing curriculum and suggests principles that can counter these biases within the classroom.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

Junot Díaz’s 2014 New Yorker article "MFA vs POC," and Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Cap Max King’s The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books)—among many other works—have identified a clear set of problems in creative writing. The creative writing classroom has centered certain experiences and has, as a result, served to marginalize, demean, or exclude many of the student-writers that come to it. In my view, this is the most urgent problem facing creative writing today. I’ve worked in my classroom to recognize my own blindspots and the limitations of the practices I’ve inherited as a writer and teacher. With this book, I wanted to put my pedagogy and my thinking up for examination in the hopes that it would continue the conversation: What does an antiracist pedagogy for creative writing look like? How do we undo the exclusionary tendencies that are at work in creative writing? These are the questions I came to the book with, and they are the questions I hope the book keeps present in teachers’ and students’ minds.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

In the introductory chapter of the book, I offer a bit of my own personal backstory as both a student and teacher of creative writing. I first became interested in creative writing pedagogy when I was an undergraduate student experiencing it. I knew then that creative writing was forwarding a specific set of literary values, though they weren’t discussed explicitly in those terms. It was then that I decided I wanted to develop a better language for identifying and naming these values. I wanted to make these values seem less natural, less of a given in creative writing. I wanted to expose these values as contingent and as tied to identity. So I’ve been working on this project, in one way or another, since I was in the course Introduction to Creative Writing in my first year of college. I see Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is a waypoint in this journey, and I plan to keep writing about this topic. In fact, Bloomsbury will soon be publishing a couple of books that I am working on now: One is titled Critical Creative Writing, and it is an anthology of essays, written by a wide range of authors, that represent some key debates about literary value and identity. Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is written primarily for other teachers, and Critical Creative Writing is written for writers of all levels, including students.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Thanks to writers in creative writing studies and those who participate in conferences like Thinking Its Presence, there is a growing conversation that exposes the problems of the workshop and the marginalizing tendencies of creative writing’s institutions. But there is much more work to be done—and part of that work focuses on transforming the creative writing curriculum. What can creative writing teachers do to help ensure a more inclusive learning space that ensures dignity and respect for all writers and that advocates for the full diversity of literary traditions? Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is focused on this question.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Literature provides us a way of looking at ourselves and of transforming ourselves. We can see ourselves in our full complexity in the stories we tell, in the artforms we create. We can also envision something different for ourselves—our societies, our planet—through literary and artistic modes. I hold to that potential of literary writing, and it’s what excites and motivates me as a teacher. I have the privilege of witnessing my students engaging in the transformative capacities of literature. I have the privilege of helping to create a space that fosters that experience.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Stephanie Vanderslice and Becca Manery have put together a wonderful 10^th anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (which I am honored to be part of). The first edition of this book was a landmark text in creative writing studies, and the tenth anniversary edition broadens the scope of the field’s work significantly. I also loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words for the attention to language the Lahiri offers in both content and form. Next on my reading list are English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan and Censorship and the Limits of the Literary, edited by Nicole Moore.

 

Janelle Adsit is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Humboldt State University. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as Cultural Society, Confrontation, and Requited. She is the author of Unremitting Entrance and a chapbook Press Yourself Against a Mirror. Her research focuses on creative writing pedagogy and labor issues in higher education. She serves as Reviews Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her new book Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum is now available from Bloomsbury.

Q&A with Robert Harvey

Robert Harvey answered some questions about his new book, Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics. 

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

The book demonstrates how thought fueled by imagining liminal life – life at its limit – in what Foucault termed heterotopias, or “spaces otherwise,” stimulates ethical dealings with each other.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’ve devoted most of the scholarly dimension of my career to trying to figure out if art – as I have stubbornly surmised – is a repository of stimuli for making politics (the creation of the future) the moral activity it ought to be. My archival and analytical research in 2013-2014 for the Pléiade edition (Gallimard) of Marguerite Duras’s complete works led me to discover an important philosophical dimension in an ignored short story. This, in combination with a thorough rereading of Michel Foucault’s reliance on literature and, in particular, on the poetry of René Char, led me to the core thread of the book, which I call “hope from heresy.”

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

I started focused research on this book project at the beginning of 2013. In many ways Sharing Common Ground builds upon my study of our propensity for empathy in my 2010 book with Bloomsbury, Witnessness. But in addition to the work on Duras for Gallimard, to which I alluded above, I had occasion in the context of a graduate seminar in Spring 2013 to return to deep reading of major works by Foucault (who, incidentally, had been at Berkeley when I was in graduate school). Two things struck me in the sinews of Foucault’s writing: his abiding deference to inspiration from René Char and his use, in The Order of Things, of the strange formula of the “point of heresy.” From those two springs, my thirst for a project was satiated.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Groups of human actors can together form the basis for an ethics-driven politics. Michel Foucault inspired generations of humanists when he forged the notion of “heterotopia.” Like utopias, heterotopias are at a remove – but only spatially, not temporally. Unlike utopias, heterotopias “claw and gnaw at us,” for they are of our world. Concentration camps, cemeteries, and slums are names for some of these “spaces otherwise” as Foucault was prone to put it. Unable to ignore them, what are we to make of these rebarbative spaces? My answer is that when two or more people imagine spaces otherwise,” their endeavor to do so in common can foster ethical relationships of an especially insightful and impactful sort. In the course of this demonstration, I also challenge Giorgio Agamben’s radical reduction of present and future society to the model of the camp by reinforcing the critical difference between biopolitics and biopower that Michel Foucault did not always clarify. It is in this difference, where biopower still holds its own against biopolitics, that a future for the species to which we belong may be envisioned.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Having always studied philosophy or, more broadly, the history of ideas, I was magnetically drawn to literary texts that took up the challenge of philosophy’s hardest questions not by means of argumentation, but by means of narrative, style, poetic language.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Two books in the series that particularly strike me as essential are The Invention of Monolingualism by David Gramling and Beyond Discontent by Eckart Goebel – the first because monolingualism is the sure route to the demise of the species against which Gramling’s sweeping study is an eloquent cautionary tale; the latter (which actually came out first) because I never understood how the sublime, which I think is so fundamental to bringing reason to ethical maturity, and sublimation sometimes come to cohabit until Goebel’s masterpiece.

 

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, USA. His teaching ranges from literary and film theories to modern and contemporary literatures and the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse. His 2010 book published by Continuum/Bloomsbury, Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics appeared in French as Témoignabilité (2015). He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras (2011, 2014). Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, 2001-2007. His latest book, Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics, is now available from Bloomsbury.

Q&A with Jane Hiddleston

Jane Hiddleston answered some questions about her new book, Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

It’s a study of the role and status of francophone literature in North Africa from the 1980s to the present.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’ve worked on francophone postcolonial literatures for a long time, and my previous book was a study of a group of major literary writers who were also political figures during the period of decolonization. Writing After Postcolonialism looks at the following generation, to see whether perceptions of the power of literature have changed. This is also a crucial period because it’s one where writers have been treated with intense suspicion: some were killed in Algeria during the 1990s, and many across the region have seen their work banned. I wanted to explore why it was that literature could provoke such reaction, and also to reflect on how this climate changed the ways in which writers think about their work.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

Much of the thinking for the book was germinating for quite some time, while I was working on my previous study of intellectuals and decolonization. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between literature and politics, and the recent period in North Africa is one where that relationship has been particularly fraught. I began thinking in detail about the texts chosen for close reading in 2012, though some of the writers, such as Assia Djebar have interested me for much longer – I published a book on her back in 2006. I did a lot of the writing for Writing After Postcolonialism while on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2014-15.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

The book looks at a broad corpus of francophone North African literary works published between 1980 and 2015, and offers an overview both of contemporary cultural politics in the Maghreb and of the complementary literary critical fields of postcolonial criticism and ‘world literature’. The specific focus on literarity, however, is also important, and means that the book should be relevant not only to readers interested in North Africa but also to literary theorists more broadly.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Literature is a powerful source of inspiration and a fuel for creative thinking. As the book tries to demonstrate, it’s also a forum that encourages its readers to think for themselves, to ask questions, to contest orthodoxies, to doubt. For this reason it seems crucial to me to the survival of free thinking and to the creation of a more ethical world.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I like Maria Lauret’s Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature, also in the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. Lauret’s interest in the use of different languages in literary works ties in with my current research project on multilingualism and world literature. Her study also demonstrates how the creative use of language in literature can encourage openness and cultural dialogue.

 

Jane Hiddleston is Fellow and Tutor in French at Exeter College, University of Oxford, UK. Her previous books include Understanding Postcolonialism (2009) and Postructuralism and Postcoloniality (2010).

Q&A with Hywel Dix

Hywel Dix answered some questions for us about his new book The Late-Career Novelist: Career Construction Theory, Authors and Autofiction.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

The Late-Career Novelist is the first major study of the often-neglected later works by major, established contemporary writers.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

Like much research it started by accident: during the course of my own reading of contemporary fiction I noticed that the later-works of many contemporary writers seem to have lots of things in common. For example, they are often metafictive in a very particular way, foregrounding one or more characters who are themselves either writers or artists, or at least some kind of storyteller. Plus, in many cases, authors in the late stages of their careers seem to write about themes, events or ideas that they have already portrayed earlier in their careers, but from a new perspective. It is as if by inserting the figure of an author or narrator into their own fictional work, they are adding a newly self-conscious and self-reflective avatar of themselves to material that they have already produced.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

It has been a big project. Realising that lots of literary careers go through comparable stages in this way led me to research the concept of a career as such, and this in turn is how I ‘discovered’ the field known as Career Construction Theory – which is really a sub-branch of psychology – and which was enormously useful in helping me to conceptualise the different components of an authorial career from a theoretical point of view.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

To my knowledge, this is the first critical study to apply Career Construction Theory to literary research and to discussion of authorial careers. (Although interestingly, as a branch of psychology, CCT is distantly related to psychoanalysis, which most certainly HAS been thoroughly and effectively applied to literary research in all sorts of ways.) In fact, the more I read about Career Construction Theory, the more I was struck by the disparity between how quick literary scholars have been to embrace psychoanalysis compared to their neglect of Career Construction Theory. I was interested in finding out why this should be.

What is really interesting is the method employed by Career Construction Theory: once upon a time, career counselors would mainly have relied on psychometric testing, computerized aptitude tests and various other forms of statistical data to try and advise their clients on suitable choices of careers. Career Construction Theory transforms this approach by combining it with a qualitative, narrative-based method: In effect, its practitioners ask their clients to see themselves as authors of their own life stories, as well as the main protagonists in those stories, in order to help them write the next chapter in that life story (which means entering a new stage of their career by making new vocational decision based on the critical self-awareness that arises by seeing themselves in their own stories.)

Since Career Construction Theory treats all clients who have entered a period of career uncertainty as metaphorical ‘authors’ of their own career narratives, I thought it would be really interesting to apply this method to a category of people whose careers are already literally authors. In other words, in my study, the mainly metaphorical concept of authorship that I found in Career Construction Theory is rendered strangely literal and is even given a physical, mechanical aspect by identifying the different stages of a career that contemporary writers go through. This is turn enabled me to focus particularly on the oft-overlooked late stages and late works. But I should also say that ‘late’ here is not an effect of biological age: I define ‘lateness’ as a relational construct, defined by its alignment with what has come before. In this sense, somebody could be a ‘late’ author at a relatively young age if they have already achieved a certain degree of success; or they could be a ‘new’ author at an advanced age.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

I have studied English at BA, MA and PhD level so I guess it is my life. As university academics, rightly or wrongly we often find ourselves under pressure to demonstrate the vocational benefit to our students of studying a subject like literature at university. I don’t wholly agree with this approach myself: I think studying literature is rich and enriching for its own sake, and many of our students would say the same. However, in the marketised environment of education that I just mentioned, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the professional skills and vocational benefit our students might gain from studying something like English Literature, given that it is not an obviously vocational ‘subject’ and given also that the job market is ever more competitive. In this sense, a research project like mine that elicits the career components of literary study is bound to be beneficial because in addition to thinking about literature for its own sake, it also has this outward-looking, vocational focus on professional behaviours in careers after graduation.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I have read Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism by Graham Matthews, and Chance and the Modern British Novel by Julia Jordan in the course of my research. Each of these speak – in quite distinct and separate ways – to some of the same concerns that I was interested in when I started looking at ideas of literary careers, vocations, callings and so on. What is especially interesting is that career choices do not simply have to be about selecting a job or company to work for; or a profession to work in. Matthews’s study clearly shows that there is an important ethical dimension to professional decisions that can also correctly be called vocational. I am also interested in the fact that – as Jordan shows – attitudes to thinks like fate, fortune, chance and luck have a discernible and changing history: how people have thought about these things has tended to be different in different periods and societies. In our own, the role of blind fate –  and the related notion of pre-destination – is increasingly being rejected altogether, especially by women writers, who are more interested in portraying worlds where their protagonists make their own decisions and so determine their own fates.

 

Hywel Dix is Principal Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. His previous books include Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Q&A with Matthew Griffiths

Matthew Griffiths answered some questions for us about The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World, now out in the Environmental Cultures series. 

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Poets need more sophisticated ways of writing to engage with climate change, and Modernism provides valuable resources for them to do so.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’d done a master’s in creative writing, focusing on poetry, and then went into publishing, where I worked as a sub-editor on a number of environmental science magazines. Climate change was an increasingly prominent issue in the material I was editing, and I wondered how I could reconcile that with what I was writing (and reading) as a poet. Most poems “about” climate change, whether mine or those of others, seemed simply to rehash familiar ideas from the press and TV. I could see nothing distinctive about them as poems, and I thought the potential that poetry offers was not being used.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

I started my PhD at Durham in 2009, so about eight years ago, but had done a fair bit of critical reading before that. Although I had been introduced to a number of stimulating approaches to texts while I was an undergraduate at Birmingham – such as feminist, postcolonial and Marxist critiques – there was nothing specifically about the environment. It was only after I had been out of academia for some years that I came across the concept of “ecocriticism”; once I did, I realised that was for me.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Climate change and Modernism had received next to no attention in ecocriticism when I started my research, and I think they had both been overlooked because they didn’t fit with the discipline’s initial, Romantic vision of nature. That was starting to change by the time I was finalising the book, but my particular interest is in how climate change retrospectively alters our conception of Modernism (and, indeed, literature), which I don’t think anyone else has attempted. I’ve also put together a brief survey of contemporary climate change poems in the final chapter, and again, to my knowledge, this has not been done elsewhere.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

I’ve always enjoyed reading – and writing! – and getting a greater understanding of the way texts and language work fascinates me. My mum did her English degree as a mature student while I was at school, and I could see how thoroughly it engaged her, so that was another inspiration. And despite – or perhaps because of – all my hard years at words, I’ve never lost my interest.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge was out just in time for me to cite in my book – it’s an incisive critique of some problematic assumptions that still persist in the field, and I was excited to read it. For the sake of disclosure, I should say he was my PhD supervisor … though this was one book he didn’t have to force me to read!

 

Matthew Griffiths is a poet and literary critic. His book The New Poetics of Climate Change is now available from Bloomsbury.

 

Q&A with Meera Atkinson

Meera Atkinson answered some questions for us about her new book, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma explores how literature testifies to trauma transmissions and how certain kinds of writing reveal their social operations and political underpinnings.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I was struck by the way family and intimate violence is routinely cast in ahistorical terms as social aberration and ‘tragedy’ while terrorism is routinely politicised. I suspected that there were certain kinds of literary writing capable of exposing feedback loops of traumatic contagion that pass between individuals, families, and collective cultural traumas like war, and my examination of selected texts convinced me that all trauma transmissions are, at root, socially operative traumas, and that literary testimony to them is therefore political in nature in ways not traditionally or sufficiently recognised.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

I began the project in 2010 when I undertook a creative PhD in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. My entry point was from the perspective of a literary writer engaged in writing a novel that attempted to show how transgenerational trauma transmissions take place (still in progress), and the scholarly aspect of my thesis was based on exploring how other writers did that and on contemplating the agency of that writing.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

There are certain questions at the heart of the book such as how does a chronicle of transgenerational trauma reveal the processes of transmission and the historic, collective traumas associated with it? And what might motivate a writer to undertake such a daunting project? Trauma is gendered, raced, classed, economized and otherwise shaped by relations of power. I propose that writing that reveals these operations, demonstrating the effects of trauma transmitted across generations, affords new understandings of the political significance of familial trauma and the cultural conditions that give rise to it, within the context of broader society.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Well, I’m a literary writer so I’m very interested in how literature works and its place and effects in society. That said, I should stress the interdisciplinary nature of the book. This is not a work of traditional literary criticism. It’s less about formalist analysis and more about identifying traumatic cultural realities the selected works witness to and considering the ways in which the writing reveals them. I viewed this methodology as necessary for approaching the complexities of transgenerational trauma transmissions and the writing they inspire.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Like every writer/academic, there’s always more on my ‘to read’ list than I get time for, and my interest is primarily in contemporary literature. I realize I’m perhaps biased as we are friends and have co-edited a volume (Traumatic Affect, 2013), but Michael Richardson’s Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature is a very fine book.

Meera Atkinson teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is co-editor, with Michael Richardson, of Traumatic Affect (2013) and is a widely published literary writer.

 

Q&A with Jos Smith

Jos Smith answered some questions for us about The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, the latest volume in the Environmental Cultures series.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

An appraisal of shifting cultural attitudes to nature and place in the UK over the last forty years through a detailed study of contemporary British and Irish nature writing.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I was researching the relationship between contemporary poetry, ecocriticism and cultural geography when the ‘New Nature Writing’ rose to popularity in the literary presses (from around 2006 onwards). I began to feel that there needed to be some research undertaken that could explain where this phenomenon had come from, what about it was catching public attention in such an animated way, and why it was provoking such controversy and debate. I was struck by the fact that dismissals of nature writing by ecocritics in the US seemed to be working under a misapprehension about place and its various contemporary meanings. I felt that in contemporary nature writing in the UK there was an emphasis on place as a site of tension, ambiguity, creativity and openness (all ways of thinking about place that would come naturally to a cultural geographer) which complicated this rejection of place as conservative, bounded and insular. This animation of place culture seemed to be something that had arisen quite forcefully in the UK on the back of the environmental movement in the 1970s and so I set out to explore the relationship between the New Nature Writing and this earlier social and cultural movement as a way of explaining the vibrancy of contemporary place culture.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

My interest was piqued in the subject in around 2008 and I received funding from the AHRC to undertake research more formally in 2009. It wasn’t until 2012 that I began putting the present book together though, using the research I’d undertaken previously.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Although the New Nature Writing has been featured a great deal in newspapers, online, on radio and even on television, over the last ten years, it has received little critical and academic attention. This has begun to change in the last two or three years but this is the first book-length study to take the phenomenon as its primary focus. The book also promises a variety of different critical frameworks for thinking about distinctive ‘styles’ of place such as: The Local, The Wild, Edgelands, Islands, Archipelagos and Geology.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

I was writing literature myself – poetry and essays – and so was reading very broadly. I’ve always seen writing and reading as bound up in mutually beneficial ways and some of the most exciting work I was reading blurred the distinction between what are generally talked about separately as creative and critical writing. A career in literary studies represented a means of honing my reading skills in a disciplined way. Perhaps underpinning this, I have also long felt that contemporary literature offers us a vivid way of understanding our contemporary world in ways that open up questions and debate and in ways that foster public engagement and participation.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I would draw attention to Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge: the Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. It articulates an idea that he refers to as ‘anthropocene disorder’ in which human beings, in the face of urgent apocalyptic warnings and the pressing need for change, retreat inwards and suffer from a kind of helplessness and depression. So much thinking about climate change is focused on scientifically calculated solutions when it may be the case that we have overlooked significant aspects of the problem itself and the questions it provokes for us culturally. Like an addict who understands quite rationally what he or she must do to give up the fatal behavior, who knows what the solution is, there is more important work that needs to be done psychologically and culturally before that solution can be embraced in a meaningful, holistic and sustainable way. I feel that Clark’s book draws attention to this important question.

 

Jos Smith is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. He has published on contemporary poetry and the New Nature Writing. He is a member of the advisory board of the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Consortium and of Common Ground itself. He is also the author of a first collection of poems Subterranea. His latest book, The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, is now available from Bloomsbury.

Bloomsbury Holiday Wish Lists - Featuring David Hering

Is there any better gift to give or receive than books? We don’t think so! So we’ve asked some of our authors to share with us their Bloomsbury Holiday Wish Lists, to help inspire your gift-giving this season!

Today's Wish List is from David Hering, author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form. He is Lecturer in English and Co-Director of the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool, UK.

1. Global Wallace by Lucas Thompson

DH: Being a Wallace scholar, I'm always on the lookout for new and exciting work in this area. I'm really interested to see how Lucas Thompson situates Wallace's work in a global context. This is a fairly unexplored area of Wallace scholarship. I'm particularly looking forward to hearing about the influences of Julio Cortazar and Manuel Puig on his work.

2. Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History by Francis O'Gorman

DH: Worrying is an unwritten element of the academic job description, and the premise of Francis O'Gorman's book - a mixture of literary, cultural and personal histories of worrying - sounds really appealing to me. Maybe I should be worried that I'm so drawn to a book about worrying!

3. Hood (Object Lessons) by Alison Kinney

DH: I seriously need to catch up on the Object Lessons series, and Alison Kinney's book on the cultural history of the hood strikes me as having such rich potential. I teach on the history of American race relations, the war on terror and the anti-globalisation movement - this book combines all three!

4. Angelo Badalemanti's Soundtrack to Twin Peaks (33 1/3) by Clare Nina Norelli

DH: I'm a complete Twin Peaks and 33 1/3 nut, so the impending publication of this book is heaven to me. I should try and get it read ahead of the new series next year. I still hold a desire to write a 33 1/3 book on one particular album - I couldn't possibly reveal which, though...

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Explore these books and more on Bloomsbury.com. All available titles, including David Hering's David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, are on sale for the holidays through December 11.

H.G. Wells, Tom Cruise, Life on Mars and Doctor Who

Peter Beck reflects on points raised by his recently published book The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond:

In The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond (Bloomsbury: 2016), you state that H.G. Wells’s book, though published in 1898, still sells well today.

The book remains in print, and is widely available online and in translation.  We can expect more editions next year with the expiration of copyright. For most readers, the story about a Martian invasion of Britain proves an excellent read, an exciting sci-fi page-turner raising such fantasy counterfactuals as ‘Is there life on Mars?’ and if so ‘What if the Martians invaded earth?’. It sells also as a tie-in book to such adaptations as the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film and Jeff Wayne’s music stage show.

Does The War of the Worlds possess any contemporary resonance?

The story’s enduring appeal derives in part from its timeless focus upon such questions about life on Mars and national security. For Jeff Wayne, Wells’s storyline ‘resonates today’, and still talks to the present-day world. Stephen Baxter, the bestselling sci-fi writer, and Niall Ferguson, the historian, are among those giving Wells high praise for his prescience.

What does The War of the Worlds tell us about Wells as a writer?

The War of the Worlds highlights Wells’s skills as a writer of what he called scientific romances, a magician who encouraged readers to suspend their disbelief by mixing doses of fantasy with substantial portions of real life.  The War of the Worlds shows how Wells’s writing drew upon his personal experience, strong sense of time and place, scientific knowledge, creative imaginative skills, and informed vision of the time to come.

How did the book’s success impact upon Wells’s reputation?

The War of the Worlds was instrumental in enabling Wells, who began writing the story when he was only 29 years old, to make his mark in the challenging literary world. In turn today he is represented as one of the founders of science fiction, indeed - to quote Brian Aldiss – ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’. Just as Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) inspired television’s Doctor Who, so The War of the Worlds pioneered alien invasion stories.

How far have adaptations become people’s initial point of contact with The War of the Worlds?

The story has proved highly adaptable. Frequently reimagined and retold over time, The War of the Worlds has been taken repeatedly to new and diverse audiences through a wide range of multimedia formats setting the story in different locations and time periods. Thus, for many people today The War of the Worlds has come to mean, say, a film, a music show or a radio drama.

How would you describe your new book?

Apart from telling readers a lot about Wells as a writer, especially his rapid emergence as a new young writer and present-day cultural significance, my book is best represented as a biography of The War of the Worlds. In brief, it analyses critically Wells’s book – its inspiration, research, writing, reception and impact – as well as the story’s active and successful multimedia afterlife, with special emphasis placed upon adaptations by Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg and Jeff Wayne. There is also a substantial focus upon the Wellsian literary heritage.

Finally, your book can be seen also as marking two important Wellsian anniversaries.

Yes – My book’s publication date was targeted towards these anniversaries. 2016 marks the 150^th anniversary of Wells’s birth (21 September) and the 70^th anniversary of his death (13 August).

 

Peter J. Beck is Emeritus Professor of History at Kingston University.  His previous books include Presenting History: Past and Present (2012) and Using History, making British Policy: the Treasury and the Foreign Office 1950-76 (2006).

 

Q&A with Michael Richardson

Michael Richardson answered a few questions for us about his new book, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Gestures of Testimony argues that writing torture and its traumas in fiction requires re-thinking the relationship between state power, tortured and torturing bodies, and literary witnessing.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

When President Obama was elected in 2008, he immediately declassified additional Torture Memos and associated documents. What they described was shocking and intensely moving. The leaked report form International Committee for the Red Cross, for instance, had these incredibly powerful testimonies from detainees at CIA ‘black sites.’ But at the same time, it seemed to me that they told stories from within the confines of a particular genre: the human rights testimony. What would it take to tell those stories in other ways? What might fiction make possible that factual testimony did not?

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

Reading those memoranda, I was increasingly fascinated by the problem of how the events and experiences described in them could be account for in fiction. At the time, I was writing speeches for Jack Layton, then the leader of Canada’s NDP, so I was highly attuned to the relationship between writing and politics. But I decided what I was doing wasn’t enough about writing itself. That led me back to academia, and this book grew out of my doctoral work. All said, this book is six years in the making, so the ideas it develops are very lived in. I think that’s its greatest virtue: for all its intense and occasionally speculative theorizing, it is very grounded in practices of reading, thinking and writing.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

While there are many fine books on torture and even on its relationship to language, they tend to consider torture as an isolating, world-destroying experience. Without minimizing torture’s violence or the radical ways in which it disrupts experience, Gestures of Testimony argues that torture is always in relation to something else: a torturer, state power, an environment, or simply techniques and affects, such as shame, rage, and so on. This makes problematic the reflexive claim in trauma studies that its traumatic consequences are somehow ‘unrepresentable.’ Instead, it argues for an affective, gestural approach to writing torture and its traumas, one that embraces its corporeality and recognizes its complex, unstable and changeable relation to experience.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Writing and imagining, more than anything. I’ve read voraciously since I was young, but I’ve also written for at least as long. For me, literary studies—and the humanities more generally, actually—is a kind of thinking through writing, a means of making sense of imagining in the context of texts, histories, and theories. My research tends to be interdisciplinary (and certainly this book is), so I’m also drawn to the willingness of literary studies to embrace ideas from elsewhere.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I’m very much enjoying the couple of books I’ve read in the new Object Lessons series, because they are so concise, personal and evocative. Another book that springs to mind right now is Anthony Uhlmann’s book Thinking in Literature, which does a very fine job of showing how literature can be philosophy.

 

Michael Richardson is Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia.