Podcasts about north american literature

In today's episode, I examine our emotional connection to film narrative with Dr. Alexa Weik von Mossner….in particular, we focus on documentaries about veganism. She is a writer and ecocritical cultural studies scholar who works on American literature, film, and digital media. Dr. Weik von Mossner's scholarly research explores contemporary environmental culture from a cognitive perspective with a particular focus on affect and emotion.* After working for several years in the German film and television industry, she earned her Ph.D. in Literature and is currently appointed as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Currently, Dr. Weik von Mossner is a principal investigator on the research project “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” as well as a researcher on the project “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene”. Along with other prominent researchers, she is developing a new interdisciplinary research field in the environmental humanities, Empirical Ecocriticism. Dr. Weik von Mossner's academic book publications include Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination and Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. She is also the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film and the co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture.* During our interview, we discussed:* -Dr. Weik von Mossner's experience in German television and her creative writing process. -The foundation and long-term implications of cognitive ecocritical analysis. -The depictions and narrativization of food and how they engage audiences. -How the type of medium can change the imaginary culinary experience. -Our emotional and neuro reaction to depictions of animal abuse, global warming, and food in general. -The processes of liberated embodied simulation and how these processes are similar or dissimilar to real-life interactions with physical (edible) objects. -How the narrative strategies of a documentary, such as Cowspiracy, are mutually reinforcing on the cognitive and affective level. -The emotionalizing strategies of documentaries on veganism.*** To learn more about Dr. Weik von Mossner, visit https://www.alexaweikvonmossner.com/!*** Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please complete our podcast sponsorship form: https://www.theelementsofbeing.com/psychology-podcast-contact-us.*** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/Itunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and other listeners and guests definitely appreciate them!

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich. With Dame Hermione Lee Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds And Laura Rattray Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich. With Dame Hermione Lee Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds And Laura Rattray Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich. With Dame Hermione Lee Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds And Laura Rattray Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow Producer: Simon Tillotson

On March 9, a University of Alberta English professor named Julie Rak headlined a speaking event that was billed as a showdown on the issue of “bad feminism.” A promotional poster done up in a boxing motif included a picture of Rak on one side, and legendary Canadian author Margaret Atwood on the other. If you live outside Canada, and recognize Atwood as the author of such renowned feminist works as Cat’s Eye, you might assume that she’d be representing the side of sound feminist doctrine in this metaphorical bout. As literary critic Carmine Starnino once noted, Atwood is the “best-known English-language novelist of contemporary sexual politics.” She more or less invented the modern Anglo Canadian feminist fiction genre, specializing in what Starnino aptly describes as “salty post-Freudian satires on gender inequalities, the oppressiveness of marriage and the historical animosity of women.” In the 1980s, when I studied North American Literature as a high school elective, Atwood was the only writer with two books on our reading list. She also was the youngest writer on … The post Why They Hate Margaret Atwood appeared first on Quillette.

In this podcast Dr Sonja Schillings explores how the use of the Latin term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), which was originally applied to pirates, now creates an extralegal space which is being used to legitimise the assassination of international terrorists all over the world. This is just part of her forthcoming book, Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence. Podcast presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova. Tatiana Prorokova: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Tatiana Prorokova and I am glad to have here Dr. Sonja Schillings to discuss her forthcoming book based on her dissertation titled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence. Before we proceed, however, I’d like to say a couple of words about Dr. Schillings’ academic career. She wrote her dissertation at the graduate school of North-American Studies at Freie-Universität Berlin in Germany, where she also held a position of a substitute junior professor for North-American Literature in summer semester 2014. And since October 2014, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University in Germany. So, Sonja, in your dissertation, your main concern is the relationship between two criminal groups - pirates and terrorists. You argue that both have one thing in common and that is they can be characterized as Hostis Humani Generis. Could you elaborate on that and maybe explain your choice of these particular groups? Sonja Schillings:  My basic concern is about Hostis Humani Generis.  It is a legal term of arts,  a Latin term, which means “enemy of all human kind”,. It is, quite generally, a legal fiction that is assigned to perpetrators who are considered not just enemies but enemies of the law, of the normative order.  They are enemies so hostile and so extreme that you can  commit legitimate violence against them, just because you commit it against them. And it’s a term that was traditionally,  in legal history, equivalent or synonymous with the crime of piracy. And “the enemy of all” means that everybody, without distinction, is being attacked by them. This is why violence against them is said to be representative of the entire human race.  Or rather it’s claimed to be. The claims I look at are only ever in text. So much for that. So, pirates and terrorists. As I’ve been saying, Hostis Humani Generis was originally designated to describe pirates only, until the early nineteenth century when Hostis Humani Generis and the crime of piracy separated and Hostis Humani Generis was also used to describe slave traders – international slave traders. And then later, in the twentieth century, it was also used about perpetrators of crimes against humanity - the torturer is the most established example here. And now, what we see since the 1980s, is the political initiative to describe international terrorists as pirates. It is this link that originally spurred my interest in the topic of Hostis Humani Generis because other than the fiction itself, other than , the legal description of Hostis Humani Generis, and other than the characterization of what they do to society (i.e. the orders they attack), pirates and terrorists have very little in common.  Even so, they were constantly combined or associated with each other, despite the grave reservations of the entire maritime securities community. This is what the “pirate-terrorist nexus” refers to. T.P: So, you provide a brief historical overview of this “pirates-terrorists nexus”. But can you actually spot any difference between pirates and terrorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was there any shift after 2000/2001? S.S.: Well, yes and no. There was certainly a shift of it being more do-able – first of all that. And, second of all, you suddenly had Somali pirates, which is why maritime security became seen as piracy -  mariti...

This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series, drawn from the conference of the same name offering new perspectives on American Studies, held at Birkbeck, University of London in November 2014. . In Petrochemical Gothic, Georgiana Banita addresses the new, shifting interface of American Studies and the emerging field of Energy Humanities. Through a discussion of the anti-humanist HBO series True Detective, the paper shows that at this juncture American Studies must inevitably absorb the ethical narrative of diminishment and limit so closely interwoven with the Anthropocene and hydrocarbon culture. Yet in placing this show in a broader context, I argue that American Studies should respond to the formless menace of peak oil with an erudite historiography of energy concepts and a molecular hermeneutic capable of detecting energy traces in deep (literary and visual) subtexts. From the derelict refineries that form the backdrop of iconic film noir shootouts to the morally saturated finale of David Fincher's 1995 thriller Se7en, where giant power lines index the primal wiring of the human mind and its high-voltage potential for irreparable destruction, an intriguing pattern has emerged around the imagination of energy and evil. The roots of this entwinement can be found in fictions of the dark romantic period, whose obsessions with exhumation and excavation resonate with the Gothic inflections of Southern literature in the mid-twentieth century at the height of the oil boom. The eclectic traces of this energy unconscious surface in the first season of True Detective, which drapes the literary idiom of the Southern Gothic over a sacrificial Louisiana landscape in a state of terminal environmental decline and moral exhaustion. Leaning upon a growing archive of petro-environmental photography, the series' refinery landscapes intimate a systemic, non-localizable infestation initially associated with isolated human wrongdoing, but then gradually expanded to a morally bankrupt psychosphere as pervasive as petrochemical fumes. The series unpacks a variety of energy discourses both within and outside traditional American Studies—geochemical, ecological, thermodynamic, and cosmological—to complicate familiar narratives of energy ultimacies. It negotiates forms of gratification and exploitation in ways that link natural detritus to human depression, and the sinister post-industrial anthroposcene of toxic Louisiana to the perverted minds bred by this poisoned soil. Ultimately, I would argue, it helps us understand how the energy imaginary has invisibly shaped US literary and cultural history, and devise a melancholy methodology to anticipate its exit. The podcast was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor in North American Literature and Media at the University of Bamberg. She studied and worked at the University of Konstanz, Yale, and the University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (U of Nebraska P, 2012) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. She is currently completing her second book, a study of how the oil industry has shaped the development of transnational American literature, and she has published widely on US, Canadian, and global energy cultures, including oil movies, petrofiction, energy photography, comics about strip mining, and the role of energy rhetoric in US presidential elections.