New Books in Language and Translation

Latest Episodes:

David R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) Jun 11, 2020

Show notes

What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility?

Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and writer. He contributes to media outlets such as PBS, the BBC, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the New York Times. This is his first book.

Topics covered in this episode include:

--What’s the origin of the term “snake oil” and how it illustrates the book’s larger points.

--Which emotions social media, especially Facebook, exploit most effectively and why. How are the “sins” of social media similar to different from how traditional mass media operates?

--In both work settings and in one’s private life, what kind of human foibles and illogical fallacies put us most at risk. What one emotion may help us grow and interact with others best.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Luke Winslow, "American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump" (Ohio State UP, 2020) Jun 10, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which offers a fresh, provocative, and insightful contribution to our most pressing social challenges by taking an orientation toward catastrophe. On the face of things, argues Winslow, most of us would agree that catastrophe is harmful and avoiding it is key to human survival and progress. And yet, the planet warms, 30,000 more Americans are killed by guns each year, and Donald J. Trump creates political chaos with his rage tweets. American Catastrophe explores such examples to argue that, in fact, we live in an age where catastrophe not only functions as a dominant organizing rhetoric but further as an appealing and unifying force for many communities across America.

Winslow introduces rhetorical homology as a critical tool useful for understanding how catastrophic appeals unite Americans across disparate religious, ecological, cultural, and political spheres. More specifically, the four case study chapters examining Christian fundamentalism, anti-environmentalism, gun rights messaging, and the administration of Donald Trump reveal a consistent formal pattern-oriented toward catastrophe. Ohio State University has been gracious enough to provide temporary free access to books such as American Catastrophe through their Bibliovault Scholarly Repository.

We’d love to connect with you about the ideas in this interview and others from the New Books Network. Find your hostess with the mostess, Lee Pierce, on LinkedIn @leempierce and @rhetoriclee on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Gmail. Connect with today’s author, Luke Winslow, at winslowluke@gmail.com and read his recent Op-Ed about the COVID-19 pandemic for the Waco Tribune.

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Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018) Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable.

Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealed how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.

Thanks to OSU Press for providing disabled Upon Arrival for free through the OSU Knowledge Bank (may require in Institutional subscription). Click here to access a PDF of disabled upon arrival. You can also find an open access version of Jay’s previous book, Academic Ableism, courtesy of the University of Waterloo Arts Research Office. Click here to access Academic Ableism. Connect with Jay on Twitter @jaydolmage Connect with your host,

Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam, "Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship" (Ohio State UP, 2019) Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t interviews Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam of University of Kentucky on the new book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019), which explores how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. In this study of how neoliberal ideas limit citizenship for marginalized populations in Hong Kong, Shui-yin Sharon Yam examines how three transnational groups—mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents—engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives.

Coupling transnational feminist studies with research on emotions, Yam analyzes court cases, interviews, social media discourse, and the personal narratives of Hong Kong’s marginalized groups to develop the concept of deliberative empathy—critical empathy that prompts an audience to consider the structural sources of another’s suffering while deliberating one’s own complicity in it. Yam argues that storytelling and familial narratives can promote deliberative empathy among the audience as both a political and ethical response—carrying the affective power to jolt the dominant citizenry out of their usual xenophobic attitudes and ultimately prompt them to critically consider the human conditions they share with the marginalized and move them toward more ethical coalitions.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed chatting with Sharon about this fascinating book. Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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A. M. Ruppel, "Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017) May 27, 2020

Show notes

In this podcast, we interview Dr. Antonia Ruppel about Sanskrit Studies. Dr. Ruppel is the author the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and also teaches online Sanskrit courses at Yogic Studies.

Ideal for courses in beginning Sanskrit or self-study, this textbook employs modern, tried-and-tested pedagogical methods and tools, but requires no prior knowledge of ancient languages or linguistics. Devanāgarī script is introduced over several chapters and used in parallel with transliteration for several chapters more, allowing students to progress in learning Sanskrit itself while still mastering the script. Students are exposed to annotated original texts in addition to practise sentences very early on, and structures and systems underlying the wealth of forms are clearly explained to facilitate memorisation. All grammar is covered in detail, with chapters dedicated to compounding and nominal derivation, and sections explaining relevant historical phenomena. The introduction also includes a variety of online resources that students may use to reinforce and expand their knowledge: flash cards; video tutorials for all chapters; and up-to-date links to writing, declension and conjugation exercises and online dictionaries, grammars, and textual databases.

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Jennifer Mercieca, "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump" (Texas A&M UP, 2020) May 27, 2020

Show notes

Polarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, media, and traditional politicians set the stage in 2016 for an unprecedented presidential contest. For many, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized. In Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A&M University Press, 2020), Jennifer Mercieca shows that Trump’s rhetoric was anything but.

As a political communication expert, Mercieca describes the Trump campaign’s expert use of the common demagogic rhetorical techniques. These strategies were meant to appeal to a segment of an already distrustful electorate. Mercieca analyzes Trump’s rhetorical strategies, including argument ad hominem, reification, and paralipsis, to reveal a campaign that was morally repugnant to some, but that was also effective and that may have fundamentally changed the discourse of the American public sphere.

Carrie Gillon received her PhD from the Linguistics program at the University of British Columbia in 2006. She is currently an editor and writing coach and the cohost of the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. She is also the author of The Semantics of Determiners and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif.

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Thomas A. Discenna, "Discourses of Denial: The Rhetoric of American Academic Labor" (Routledge, 2017) May 27, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (they/she) interviews Thomas A. Discenna of Oakland University about the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics and detractors, the unionization struggles of graduate students, the invisibility of contingent academics and the resistance to the unionization of student athletes.

In Discourses of Denial: The Rhetoric of American Academic Labor (Routledge, 2017), Discenna paints a compelling picture of “the denial of academic labor” happening across public and private institutions, arguing that it functions to underwrite an attack on labor in all of its variations. The professoriate is, therefore, not a retrograde figure of more genteel times but the emblematic figure of late capitalism’s transition to cognitive labor and with it an unceasing colonization of the human lifeworld.

I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Tom about this illuminating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd.

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Diana Senechal, "Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) May 25, 2020

Show notes

In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targeting a variety of terms, the author contends that a “good fit” may not always be desirable; delivers a takedown of the adjective “toxic”; and argues that “social justice” must take its place among other justices. This book also includes a critique of our modern emphasis on quick answers and immediate utility.

By scrutinizing words and phrases that serve contemporary fads and follies, this book stands up against the excesses of language and offers engaging alternatives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, social sciences, music, and technology, Senechal offers a rich framework to make fresh connections between topics. Combining sharp criticism, lyricism, and wit, Mind over Memes argues for judicious and imaginative speech.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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James M. Jasper, "Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame" (Oxford UP, 2020) May 22, 2020

Show notes

Did Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral? What is character work and how do characters with roots in ancient crease help us understand 21st-century politics? While many scholars of politics focus on plots, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young and Elke Zuern encourage us to look at the characters – particularly the simplified packaging of the intentions, capacities, and actions of public figures.

In Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jasper and his colleagues show how political figures often allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions. Democracies need to understand where characters -- heroes, villains, victims, and minions – come from in order to keep their influence within proper bounds. Although part of a Western rhetorical tradition, character work is often done through dress, posters, facial expressions, statues, paintings, photos, and music.

In the podcast, Jasper discusses Trump’s conveying of ancient rhetorical symbols through Twitter, the gendered nature of “strength” or “heroism,” and the uncomfortable use of stereotypes that shape group “characters.”

Susan Liebellis associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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