Reed Faculty Reflect on Recent Publications
Six professors discuss their recent works spanning the storied life of Buddha, the Soviet Jewish bookshelf, essays on the Qur'an and Islam, and more.
The Buddha: A Storied Life, by Kristin Scheible
cowritten with Vanessa R. Sasson (Oxford University Press, 2023)
What is your book about? Over 2,500 years and a global geographical spread, various representations and retellings of the foundational life story of the Buddha have animated and sustained Buddhist thought and practice. Buddhist holidays, pilgrimages, and rituals are pinned to the arc of his biography, and his story is the model for exemplary Buddhists to follow. In this cowritten volume, my coeditor and I have assembled premier scholars of South Asian Buddhism to articulate the Buddha Blueprint, the narrative underlying pattern that holds the life story of a buddha together. We retell episodes of Buddha Gautama’s extended life story to stress the multivalent centrality of this story and its cosmic and proximate impact.
Who should read this book? A colleague told me it was prominently displayed at the Met, so it has a broader audience than my other scholarship. Anyone interested in Buddhism or the idea of a buddha will find it useful and thought-provoking.
Anything else? The book sprang forth from my conference Religion 331: Lives of the Buddha. —CB
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Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France, by Ann Delehanty
(Routledge, 2023)
What is your book about? How five 17th-century European novels use moments of contradiction, shock, and surprise to suggest that all is not as it seems in the world. These works seek to train their readers to be more skeptical about
appearances.
Why is this important? These 17th-century novels engage in a kind of philosophical reasoning that was popular in the era and show how works of the imagination can play a role in helping people recognize the incoherence of social illusions. The novels also reveal that our era is not the first with problems of “fake news” and that there are creative ways to combat the myriad deceptions that bombard us.
What surprised you about the topic? Once I started to look for moments of shock or surprise in these novels, I found them everywhere. I had to adjust my reading methods to understand this as a dynamic model of a literary work—putting ideas in juxtaposition with one another, like a Platonic dialogue might—rather than a static model. —CB
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The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines, by Marat Grinberg
(Brandeis University Press, 2023)
What is your book about?
It examines how in the post-World War II period, Soviet Jews preserved their Jewish identity by reading a common set of culturally significant books. Whether they were reading Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Golden Calf, or Lion Feuchtwanger’s Josephus, Soviet Jews scoured Russian literature and literature translated into Russian for whatever references to Jewish life could be found, and read between the lines in order to elicit the Jewish message embedded in many works of Russian and Soviet literature.
How did you get the idea for The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf? When I was a student at Columbia University after just two years of living in the US, I took a German literature course. One day I came to talk to the professor and started talking about the German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger, and the professor’s reaction was “Why would you want to talk about him? He is so minor, he’s not particularly interesting.” That was utterly baffling to me because for my Soviet Jewish family, and for Soviet Jews at large, Feuchtwanger was a major-major author. So that experience suggested to me that Soviet Jewish culture, and identity are almost completely unknown in this country, and what is known is very limited, mythologized, and stereotyped. So this was the main impetus to excavate Soviet Jewish culture. —ML
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Non Sola Scriptura: Essays on the Qur’an and Islam in Honour of William A. Graham, coedited by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
with Bruce Fudge, Christian Lange, and Sarah Bowen Savant (Routledge, 2022)
What is your book about? Rather than focusing on a single topic or making a single argument about the Qur’an or Islamic studies, this coedited volume demonstrates the influence of Graham’s scholarship on the field of early Islamic history. Bill, as his students and colleagues referred to him, was my dissertation adviser and one of the premier scholars of the Qur’an, early Islamic history, and oral dimensions of scriptures. He also was a capable administrator who served as the dean of Harvard Divinity School and helped that school diversify its curriculum by hiring faculty who specialize in non-Christian religions and non-European Christianity.
Why is this important? His pioneering scholarship helped pave a way out of area-studies silos for scholars of Islam by using Islamic texts, beliefs, and practices to think humanistically and broadly about the role of religion in human history. My coeditors and I show in the book how successful he had been in changing the field through his mentorship and scholarship. —CB
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Espejismos reales. Imágenes y política en la literatura rioplatense, by Diego Alonso
(EDUVIM, 2023)
Briefly, what is your book about? It’s about the deployment of images in the work of five canonical River Plate authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Rodolfo Walsh, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Ricardo Piglia. Their imagistic writing activates a rich network of associations that expands the concept of mimesis and makes possible new ways of engaging with history, justice, ethics, and politics.
Why is this important? My reconsideration of this largely 20th-century corpus sheds light on pressing questions confronted by current literature and criticism. I put this corpus in dialogue with the so-called iconic turn reflected in the recent proliferation of fiction works that incorporate visual materials. I also establish crucial links between the texts and the new politization of contemporary biographical and testimonial narratives.
Who should read this book? Anyone who is interested in deepening their understanding of these authors or of aesthetics and literary theory and their relationship to history, justice, ethics, and politics. —CB
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Making German Jewish Literature Anew, by Katja Garloff
(Indiana University Press)
What is your book about? The book traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to today. I found that the rise of a new generation of authors who identify as both German and Jewish and who often keep affiliations with several countries offered a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of a diasporic literature.
Why is this important? It’s important to understand how these new writers, who come two or three generations after the Holocaust, use Jewish identity in their texts. Throughout the book, I ask what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author’s identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflect on existing definitions of Jewish literature.
Who should read this book? It’s definitely an academic book, but I provided a broad introduction and enough information about these authors for any reader to get a sense of the importance of the topic. What surprised you about the topic? I wasn’t really surprised by how fast contemporary literature changes, but trying to catch a rapidly moving phenomenon was quite interesting. These new writers seem to bring different kind of experiences to each new work. —CB
Tags: Books, Film, Music