3.5 The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman talks to Shola von Reinhold (AV)

Posted byhajo43545Posted inBen Bateman, Shola von Reinhold

Shola von Reinhold is the author of  LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 James Tait Black prize so who better to join Shola on Novel Dialogue than Ben Bateman of Edinburgh University, lead judge of the prize committee? This conversation takes listeners back to all yesterday’s parties as Shola, Ben, and Aarthi time travel to the Harlem Renaissance and the interwar modernist era. Shola offers up Richard Bruce Nugent as their current figure of fascination (or “transfixion” to use a key image from LOTE), and wonders what it would have been like to move through Harlem and London by Nugent’s side.

Recovering the stories of black writers and artists is essential to Shola’s literary project.  It is also inseparable from restoring queerness to the once hyper-masculine and “muscular” paradigm of modernism. In a stirring discussion of the aesthetic forms and moods of historical recovery, Ben and Shola sink into the “purpleness” of the fin-de-siècle and explore the critical power of black sensuousness. Talk of decadence, ornamentality, and frivolity shapes the latter half of this episode, and Doris Payne, the West Virginian jewel thief, emerges as an exquisitely improbable modernist heroine!

Mentioned in this episode:

Richard Bruce Nugent
Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, Porgy
E.M. Forster
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue
Saidiya Hartman
Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts
James Joyce, Ulysses
Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”
Ornamentality via Kant, Hegel, and Adolf Loos
Susan Sontag
Doris Payne – a.k.a “Diamond Doris”
Édouard Glissant

Listen and Read:

Audio: The Romance of Recovery

Transcript: 3.5 The Romance of Recovery

11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem – Novel Dialogue

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.MentionsMarx – base-superstructure modelBruno Latour – actor-network theorySophie Bishop – Influencer CreepAndrew de Waard –  Derivative MediaPierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
  1. 11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem
  2. 11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
  3. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  4. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
  5. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
Listen to more episodes

Photo credit: Retouched by Mmxx, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons