Description

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
New Books Network
Épisodes
  • Suzanne Bost, "Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities" (U Minnesota Press)

    Suzanne Bost, "Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities" (U Minnesota Press)
    Mar 15 2026
    What would it mean to disentangle humanities scholarship from combative, extractive, and colonial ways of knowing and writing? This is the question that animates Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities (U Minnesota Press), the latest book by literary scholar and poet Suzanne Bost. Quiet Methodologies isn’t a traditional work of literary scholarship. Instead, the book reaches toward alternative ways of thinking with and teaching literature, grounded in speculation and conversation. It models a quiet kind of humanities work, committed not to asserting answers but to asking questions, not to claiming mastery but to embracing uncertainty. For all its quietness, then, Quiet Methodologies is a bold and challenging work. Speaking to a moment of crisis within and beyond the academy, its provocations and explorations will be of interest to scholars and students working across humanities disciplines. In conversation with Alix Beeston, Bost shares about the literary archives and scholarly works that helped her to unlearn scholarly conventions. She sets out her vision for reimagining humanities labor in terms of ethical responsibility, receptiveness, care—and even, perhaps, love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
    Voir plus Voir moins
    57 min
  • E. and H. Heron, "Flaxman Low: Occult Detective" (MIT Press, 2026)

    E. and H. Heron, "Flaxman Low: Occult Detective" (MIT Press, 2026)
    Mar 15 2026
    Flaxman Low, literature’s first professional, full-time “occult detective”—that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method when tackling paranormal phenomena—appeared in a dozen stories first published from 1898–1899. Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press, 2026), the latest edition to the Radium Age series from MIT Press, is introduced and discussed by Dr. Alexander B. Joy. Flaxman Low’s creators, the mother-and-son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh “Hex” Prichard (who published as “E. and H. Heron”), endowed the Oxford-trained psychologist with the bravery and acumen to tackle every sort of adversary from ghosts, mummies, and vampires to a mushroom mannequin. Both less credulous and less cynical than earlier fictional investigators of the spirit world, Low always triumphs in the end . . . but not before scientifically demonstrating that even the most outré incidents and situations can’t hold a candle to the bizarre capacities of the human mind. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
    Voir plus Voir moins
    25 min
  • William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Good: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic" (Lexington, 2018)

    William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Good: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic" (Lexington, 2018)
    Mar 14 2026
    At the crisis of his Republic, Plato asks us to imagine what could possibly motivate a philosopher to return to the Cave voluntarily for the benefit of others and at the expense of her own personal happiness. This book shows how Plato has prepared us, his students, to recognize that the sun-like Idea of the Good is an infinitely greater object of serious philosophical concern than what is merely good for me, and thus why neither Plato nor his Socrates are eudaemonists, as Aristotle unquestionably was. With the transcendent Idea of Beauty having been made manifest through Socrates and Diotima, the dialogues between Symposium and Republic—Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Theages, Meno, and Cleitophon— prepare the reader to make the final leap into Platonism, a soul-stirring idealism that presupposes the student’s inborn awareness that there is nothing just, noble, or beautiful about maximizing one’s own good. While perfectly capable of making the majority of his readers believe that he endorses the harmless claim that it is advantageous to be just and thus that we will always fare well by doing well, Plato trains his best students to recognize the deliberate fallacies and shortcuts that underwrite these claims, and thus to look beyond their own happiness by the time they reach the Allegory of the Cave, the culmination of a carefully prepared Ascent to the Good. William H. F. Altman, having been persuaded by Plato's Republic that Justice requires the philosopher to go back down into the Cave, has devoted his professional life to the cause of public education. Since retiring in 2013, he has been working as an independent scholar on the continuation of Plato the Teacher (2012). Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 23 min
Pas encore de commentaire