literature – Recall This Book

158* Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)

Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie.

151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)

Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why?

To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary.

Kristin Mahoney‘s books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti ‘s first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don’t need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession.

Mentioned in the episode

Theosophical Society in Chennai

Annie Besant

Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant.

Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on grand theorizations of race by folks like Acton

C L R James

Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Nasser with an important reminder oF the importance of “hating tradition properly.”

H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel.

The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of postcolonialism that replaced it,

Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future.

John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books.

The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name.

Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life .

Listen to the episode here. Read the Episode here.

150* Steve McCauley on Barbara Pym: The Comic Novel Explored and Adored (JP)

Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve–his latest is You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, but John still holds a candle for his 1987 debut, Object of My Affection, made into a charming Jennifer Aniston Paul Rudd movie. And there is no comic novelist Steve loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who found herself forgotten and unpublishable in middle age, only to roar back into print in her sixties with A Quartet in Autumn. Steve and John’s friendship over the years has been sealed by the favorite Pym lines they text back and forth to one another, so they are particularly keen to investigate why her career went in this way.

stephen-mccauley-2017 photo — Steve McCauley

In the episode, they talk about some of these favorite sentences from Pym, and then turn to the comic novel as a genre. They talk about the difference between humorous and comic writing, the earthiness of comedy, whether comic novels should have happy or sad endings, and whether the comic novel is a precursor to, or an amoral relief from, the sitcom. They also discuss some of Steve’s fiction, including his Rain Mitchell yoga novels. In Recallable Books John recommends Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell and Steve recommends After Claude by Iris Owens.