Pod45

Pod45's 20th episode spectacular! To discuss our recent cluster on Suspicion, Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles is joined by cluster editor Eleanor Russell and cluster contributors Olivia Stowell, Sheera Talpaz, and Samuel Catlin. You can read all the essays in the Suspicion cluster now at: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/suspicion/ Hosted and produced by Michael Docherty.

Welcome back to another episode of Pod45, the podcast companion to Post45: Contemporaries, with your host Michael Docherty. Today's discussion responds to our recent cluster American Bimbo. Joining Michael in a conversation about the enduring potency and complexity of the bimbo as an American cultural figure, celebrity and media in the 2000s, and more recent hyperonline reclamations and revisions of bimbodom, are Emmeline Clein, who edited the cluster, and two of its fantastic contributors – Rax King and Rob Franklin. Read American Bimbo now at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/american-bimbo, where you can also find hundreds more incisive and insightful essays on contemporary literature and culture. Emmeline Clein (emmelineclein.net; @emmelclein) is the author of Dead Weight (2024). Rax King (raxkingisdead.com; @raxkingisdead)is the author of Tacky (2021) and the forthcoming Sloppy (2025). Rob Franklin (robert-michael-franklin.com; @robfrank__) is the author of the forthcoming Great Black Hope (2025). Michael Docherty (michaeldocherty.co.uk; @maybeavalon) is the author of The Recursive Frontier: Race, Space, and the Literary Imagination of Los Angeles (2024). This episode was written, produced, and engineered by Michael Docherty for Post45.

Today on Pod45 we turn our attention to our recent cluster Reading Disco Elysium, edited by Jess Anderson and Carl White. Disco Elysium is a critically acclaimed videogame first released in 2019. It has been widely recognized for the richness of its storytelling, its political, moral, and ethical complexity, and how it plays with questions of choice, agency, and narrative structure in ways that fundamentally destabilize the gaming experience. That is to say, Disco Elysium is an incredibly readerly text, one that we were delighted to invite Jess, Carl, and their brilliant contributors to reflect on in this cluster. One of those contributors, Hayley Toth, joined Jess, Carl, and Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty, for this Pod45 conversation. You can find all the wonderful essays in Reading Disco Elysium at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/reading-disco-elysium/ now. At https://post45.org/contemporaries/ you can also find our archive of over sixty more clusters. Follow us on Twitter/X, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky: the handle everywhere is @AtPost45. If you're interested in pitching us an idea for a cluster, please email us at post45contemporaries@gmail.com. Further information on what we look for in a pitch can be found on our website.

Pod45 returns after a hiatus with a bumper episode responding to Contemporary Literature from the Classroom, a recent cluster edited by Rebecca Roach - available now at post45.org/contemporaries. Today's episode is a departure from our usual format. We begin as we always do, with a rich and wide-ranging roundtable discussion building on the cluster at hand: Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty hosts; his guests are cluster editor Rebecca Roach, and cluster contributors John Roache (no relation) and Tim Lanzendörfer. But in the second half we bring you something different: a very special conversation between Rebecca and Adrienne Ghaly, co-creator of Read for Action, also known as the Humanitarian Book Club. Thanks for sticking with us at Pod45: we've got exciting plans afoot to start bringing you episodes on a more regular and reliable basis. If you're enjoying the episodes, please tell friends and colleagues, and don't forget to rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice. https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/contemporary-literature-from-the-classroom/ https://x.com/AtPost45 https://www.readforaction.org/

Welcome back to another year of Pod45! In today's episode, Post45: Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sits down to discuss our recent cluster on The Bachelor with the cluster's editors, Rhya Moffitt and Annie Bares, and two of its contributors, Robin Hershkowitz and Emily Edwards. You can read The Bachelor at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/the-bachelor/ now. Pod45 is hosted and produced by Michael Docherty.

Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty discusses our recent Heteropessimism cluster with two of its co-editors, Annabel Barry and Caroline Godard. The cluster's third co-editor was Jane Ward. You can read all the essays in the Heteropessimism cluster now at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/heteropessimism/

After a short summer hiatus, Pod45 is back! We're delighted to bring you an episode discussing our recent 16-piece marathon cluster Abortion Now, Abortion Forever, which was published to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization. This urgently important cluster can be found at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/abortion-now-abortion-forever/. In conversation on the cluster and the issues to which it responds are Contemporaries editor-in-chief Gloria Fisk and cluster editors Margaret Ronda, Jena DiMaggio, and Jeannette Schollaert. As Margaret, Jena, and Jeannette write in their introduction, "abortion aid funds and reproductive health collectives can always use more assistance, and we encourage everyone reading this cluster to donate if they can!" Please visit: National Network of Abortion Funds https://abortionfunds.org/ The National Network of Abortion Funds builds power with members to remove financial and logistical barriers to abortion access by centering people who have abortions and organizing at the intersections of racial, economic, and reproductive justice. Sister Song https://www.sistersong.net/  SisterSong's mission is to strengthen and amplify the collective voices of indigenous women and women of color to achieve reproductive justice by eradicating reproductive oppression and securing human rights. Student Coalition for Reproductive Justice https://www.thescrj.org/donate Towards the end of this episode, we discuss Jena's involvement with the Student Coalition for Reproductive Justice, which is doing incredible work on college campuses across the USA. The SCRJ's mission is to educate and empower youth to take charge of their reproductive autonomy. Through intentional engagement and strategic activism, the SCRJ endeavors to break the systematic barriers that prevent equitable access for all students to reproductive health care and quality sexual education.

Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles discusses our recent cluster Little Magazines with its editor Nick Sturm, and two of its contributors - Danny Snelson and Stephanie Anderson. Nick's introduction to the cluster: https://post45.org/2023/06/introduction-deep-immersion-in-the-little-mags/ Danny's essay, "An Elegy for Jimmy & Lucy's House of 'K' (1984–1989)": https://post45.org/2023/06/an-elegy-for-ijimmy-and-lucys-house-of-k-1984-1989/ Stephanie's interview with Susan Sherman: https://post45.org/2023/06/interview-with-susan-sherman/ Read all of the Little Magazines cluster at Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/little-magazines/ Follow us on Twitter at @AtPost45 (Bluesky and Threads coming soon, maybe), and if you're interested in pitching us an idea for a cluster, please email us at post45contemporaries@gmail.com. Further information on what we look for in a pitch can be found on our website, post45.org/contemporaries.

The cluster up for discussion today is Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics, edited by Connor Bennett and Michael Dango. This is somewhat ironically a rather maximalist cluster on minimalism, comprising eleven fantastic essays, including Connor and Michael's introduction, plus a great interview with Mark McGurl. Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty sat down with Connor and Michael to think through some of the issues in contemporary minimalism with which the cluster engages, and the questions it invites. Joining us in our discussion were Annabelle Tseng and Tina Post. Annabelle wrote “On Being Okay,” one of two essays in the cluster that respond to the writing of Weike Wang, and one which explores what Annabelle calls “a commitment to an unwavering state of being okay” as way of refusing racialized expectations of Asian American affective performance. Listeners who like the sound of that may also want to check out our previous cluster and accompanying podcast episode Gestures of Refusal, where similar ideas are explored. Tina doesn't feature in the cluster itself but we were delighted she could join us to share her expertise on the intersections of race, performance, withholding, and minimalism of both affect and aesthetics. Tina's book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression was recently published by NYU Press. Michael Dango's book Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair is available from Stanford University Press. Find Minimalisms Now at https://post45.org/contemporaries/. Follow Post45: Contemporaries on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AtPost45. Pitch us a cluster at post45contemporaries@gmail.com

This episode of Pod45 discusses our recent The Hallyu Project cluster, which was edited and introduced by Yin Yuan. Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sat down to chat about the cluster and the Hallyu phenomenon in some of its manifold dimensions with editor Yin Yuan (@yinyuanx) and three of the cluster's contributors: Eunjin Choi (@echoi_24), Rita Raley (@ritaraley), and Andrea Acosta (@a_priyd). Eunjin and Rita co-wrote the essay "K-streams: Global Korea and the OTT Era." Eunjin is a lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. Rita is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Andrea wrote "Bots and Binaries: On the Failure of Human Verification." Andrea is a current PhD candidate in English at UCLA and incoming Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Pitzer College. You can read The Hallyu Project, and sign up for our newsletter, at post45.org now. This episode was produced by Michael Docherty, with logistical co-ordination by Francisco Robles and music by Michael Docherty.

Today's episode is a response to and continuation of our recent cluster on the work of songwriter, musician, poet, and cartoonist David Berman, which you can read at post45.org/contemporaries now. Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by cluster co-editors David Hering and Sarah Osment to discuss Berman's life and artistry with his longtime friend and collaborator Bob Nastanovich. What transpired was a really special conversation, and we're very grateful to Bob for the insights he was willing to share with us. You can read David and Sarah's introduction to the cluster at https://post45.org/2023/01/introduction-6/. You can read David's essay in the cluster, "Think of Me as a Place: David Berman's Rooms in Time," at https://post45.org/2023/01/think-of-me-as-a-place-david-bermans-rooms-in-time/. You can read Bob's beautiful postscript to the cluster at https://post45.org/2023/01/postscript/.

Happy New Year from Pod45. Sincere thanks to everyone who's listened to the podcast in its first year; we really appreciate your support and hope you've enjoyed listening to the episodes as much as we enjoyed making them. We're looking forward to bringing you more impassioned and informed conversations about contemporary culture in 2023. Today's episode of Pod45 takes us to a cluster we published last month – For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise. For a great discussion of these much loved and wildly successful movies, Post45 co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by cluster editor Maggie Boyd, and two of the cluster's contributors – Nichole Nomura, and Mackenzie Streissguth. You can read For Speed and Creed now at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/for-speed-and-creed/. Sign up for the Post45 newsletter at: https://post45.org/19281-2/ This episode of Pod45 was produced by Michael Docherty and Gunner Taylor. Michael Docherty wrote the theme music.

This episode of Pod45 discusses our recent Gestures of Refusal cluster, co-edited by Sarah Bernstein and Yanbing Er. Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sat down to chat about the cluster (as well as broader questions and themes it suggests) with Sarah and Yanbing, alongside Akwugo Emejulu, who contributed the essay "Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal" to the cluster, and Xine Yao, whose writing doesn't feature in the cluster but whose work and thought on (dis)affect, (un)feeling, and refusal articulates closely related concerns. Pod45 host and Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty also provides some information on how you can stay informed about Contemporaries and Post45 more generally in the event that Twitter, currently our primary means of circulating our clusters, disappears in a cloud of billionaire hubris. You can read Gestures of Refusal, and sign up for our newsletter, at post45.org now. Guests Dr. Yanbing Er (@eryanbing), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore Dr. Sarah Bernstein, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Creative Writing, University of Strathclyde Dr. Akwugo Emejulu (@akwugoemejulu), Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick Dr. Xine Yao (@xineyaophd), Lecturer in American Literature to 1900, University College London Akwugo's Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press 2022) and Xine's Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP 2021) are out now. Production This episode was produced by Michael Docherty and co-produced by Gunner Taylor, with logistical co-ordination by Francisco Robles and music by Michael Docherty.

Today our discussion takes us to a cluster we published last month, W(h)ither the Christian Right? This cluster, a wide-ranging exploration of relationships between literature, broadly conceived, and American evangelical Christianity, was edited by Christopher Douglas and Matthew Mullins. It feels like an especially urgent and timely cluster, given the religious contexts surrounding the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the January 6th insurrection and QAnon, and the evangelical movement's embrace of Trumpism more generally, as we approach the 2022 midterms and look forward nervously to the presidential election of 2024. To discuss the role that literature plays in the evangelical world, the political moment in which the American Christian right finds itself, and how secular literary critics might engage with faith, Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by the cluster's editors Chris and Matt, alongside two of its contributors, Jenny Van Houdt and Melodie Roschman. During the episode, we mention an episode of the NYT's The Daily podcast that intersects with Jenny's essay. Listen to that here. Check out all our clusters at post45.org/contemporaries, email us at post45contemporaries@gmail.com, and follow us on Twitter at @AtPost45. Guests Jenny Van Houdt is an instructor at North Idaho College and an assessment designer for Washington State University's College of Medicine. Her work is interested in how apocalyptic thought reorients beliefs about the world. Her essay is "Red-Pilling on Patmos: A Quick and Dirty Hermeneutic for the Evangelical–QAnon Connection." Melodie Roschman (@roschmachine) is a recent English PhD graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation examines memoir, community, and resistance in the progressive Christian community surrounding the late Rachel Held Evans. Her essay is "'We Must Choose Manhood': Masculinity, Sex, and Authority in Evangelical Purity Manuals." Matthew Mullins (@MullinsMattR) is Associate Professor of English and History of Ideas at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina and the author of Postmodernism in Pieces (Oxford 2016) and Enjoying the Bible (Baker 2021). Christopher Douglas (@crddouglas) is Professor of English at the University of Victoria and the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. His recent publications include "Christian White Supremacy in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Novels" and "Silence: Kidnapping, Abuse, and Murder in Early-Twenty-First-Century White Evangelical Fiction." Chris and Matt co-edited the cluster and co-wrote its introduction.

Pod45 has been on a short hiatus over the summer but we are delighted to be back and delighted to have you back with us. Today our discussion takes us to a cluster we published earlier in the summer, at the very end of June, on the writer and translator Lydia Davis. That cluster is edited by Julie Tanner and features, alongside a wonderful range of responses to Davis's work, previously unseen journal excerpts from Davis herself, which we were honoured to be given by Davis to publish. As Julie suggests in her introduction to the cluster, there is a seeming discrepancy between what we might call Davis's cult popularity and what remains a relative lack of scholarly attention paid to her. As Julie puts it, “Davis is strikingly singular, but it is perhaps the plurality of genres and modalities that repels categories, movements, and, often, syllabi.” Yet, to quote Julie again, “though a writers' writer to some, Davis is a readers' writer for us all.” That, I think, is what the discussion you're about to hear emphasizes most. For this discussion, Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sat down with cluster editor Julie Tanner, alongside cluster contributors Jonathan Evans, Alice Blackhurst, and Lola Boorman. You can find the Lydia Davis cluster at post45.org/contemporaries now, and you can follow Contemporaries on Twitter at @AtPost45. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and if you'd like to leave us a positive rating and review that helps other people find the show.

Today's episode is the second of two responding to our recent cluster Bored as Hell, a series of essays all about being bored and being boring, why we get bored and how we unbore ourselves, depicting and manifesting boredom in art and literature. You can read Bored as Hell, as well as all our other clusters, at post45.org/contemporaries. Joining Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon on Twitter) are: Busra Copuroglu (@buscopur on Twitter), a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, who edited the cluster and wrote its introduction. Charlie Tyson (@charlietyson1 on Twitter), a PhD candidate in English literature at Harvard. Charlie wrote the piece "Bored Housewives" for the cluster. Yonina Hoffman (@yonina on Twitter), Assistant Professor at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Yonina wrote the piece "Traumatised by Capitalism? Novels of Bored Workers" for the cluster.

This episode is the first of two responding to our most recent cluster, which is titled Bored as Hell, and was edited by Busra Copuroglu. Bored as Hell is a cluster of seven essays thinking about, thinking through, and thinking with ideas of boredom and boringness. It covers a lot of ground — boredom in academia, boredom in bureaucracy, the boredom of capitalism, the boredom of domestic labor, intersections between boredom and humor, and boredom as a gift, something that shows us the value of our time and spurs us to do something with it. The cluster has much to say about boredom as represented in and perhaps even induced by literature and film, and about boredom's historical, social, and political dimensions. The cluster is interested in how we define boredom and how we avoid it, and also in boredom as an affect that is always recognizable and yet strangely capacious and flexible, closely adjacent to and inflected by multiple other states of mind — desire, idleness, melancholy, anger. As the cluster shows, boredom is a phenomenon that's been grappled with by everyone from medieval monks, to Tolstoy, Heidegger to Dennis Rodman, and its theorization is now the subject of the increasingly vibrant interdisciplinary field of boredom studies. That interdisciplinary spirit is felt throughout this cluster and is borne out in particular in today's guests. Joining Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon on Twitter) to discuss the Bored As Hell cluster and boredom more broadly are: Busra Copuroglu (@buscopur on Twitter), a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, who edited the cluster and wrote its introduction. James Danckert, Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Cognitive Neuroscience Area Head at the University of Waterloo, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "Give me death or give me boredom?" James' book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, co-written with John D. Eastwood, is out now and highly recommended. Sarah Chant, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "So Bored I Could Laugh." Read Bored as Hell at Post45: Contemporaries now.

This episode of Pod45 is the second part of a discussion emerging from our recent cluster responding to and reflecting on the work of the Scottish novelist Ali Smith. That cluster is titled Ali Smith Now and you can find it now at post45.org/contemporaries. In our previous episode, Contemporaries editors Gloria Fisk and Francisco Robles were in conversation with cluster editors Debra Rae Cohen and Cara L. Lewis alongside two of the cluster's contributors, Deidre Lynch and Amy Elkins. In this discussion Gloria, Francisco, Debra Rae and Cara are joined by a different pair of scholars who contributed to the cluster – Charlotte Terrell and Walt Hunter. Their wide-ranging conversation on Smith's work and its significance takes in allegory, puns, Scottishness, the political possibilities of the novel, the semiotics of British fried chicken chains, and more.

Pod45 is the discursive cultural criticism podcast from Post45: Contemporaries. This episode is the first of two discussions responding to our recent Ali Smith Now cluster, which takes the publication of Smith's latest novel Companion Piece as an opportunity to reflect on her unique oeuvre. Contemporaries editorial team members Gloria Fisk and Francisco Robles sit down for a conversation with cluster editors Debra Rae Cohen and Cara L. Lewis, alongside Deidre Lynch and Amy Elkins, who collaborated on a piece for the cluster. The novel form, technologies of reading, connection and disconnection, collaboration and collegiality, aesthetics and politics, nature and art(ifice), irony and enchantment, joy and love and rapture: our panel bagatelle it as they see it on all these subjects and more. Part two of Ali Smith Now will follow next week. You can read the Ali Smith Now cluster at Post45: Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/ali-smith-now/

Welcome to Pod45, the new discursive cultural criticism podcast from Post45: Contemporaries. In our first episode, Contemporaries Co-Editor Michael Docherty discusses our recent Dark Academia cluster with cluster editors Mitch Therieau and Olivia Stowell, alongside Gunner Taylor and Dylan Davidson who contributed essays to the cluster. This wide-ranging conversation explores Donna Tartt and her incredible speaking voice, the performativity of academic Twitter, the localities and temporalities of dark academia, resistance to and complicity with the many ills of the contemporary university, collective scholarship as a form of solidarity, and going "Goblin mode." Read the Dark Academia cluster at Post45: Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/dark-academia/