Four IU Comparative Literature professors published books in 2023-24. We asked these authors to comment on their work. Their responses are below.

Jacob Emery

Jacob Emery, author of The Vortex that Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature (Cornell University Press), reflects on how he developed his book:

“In 2020 I began a sabbatical semester, during which I had intended to do research toward a book called The Work of Art and Other Kinds of Work. Due to the global pandemic I was unable to travel to the archives I needed to carry out this research. Thrown upon my own resources, I decided to read through the body of my previously published articles and unfinished projects to look for recurrent themes. In short order I had diagnosed an idée fixe: the idea of an artwork that gathers the totality of the world into its form, as when Dante writes of “the scattered leaves of all the universe / bound with God’s love into a single book” or when Velmir Khlebnikov describes the world as a vast text ‘whose cover bears the creator’s signature / The sky blue letters of my name.’

The tendency was most apparent in a pair of articles on Leo Tolstoy and Osip Mandelstam respectively, but was legible in attenuated versions in other work. ‘If I adapt some of this material,’ I mused, ‘and add a chapter on avant-garde experiments in universal language and a theoretical introduction, then I will be able to wrap up a book this semester after all.’ I always think things are going to be easy until I begin them. In 2023 The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature came out with Cornell University Press, and I am mostly pleased with it—but I am also glad to be traveling to archives again.”

Sonia Velázquez

Sonia Velázquez shared some thoughts about the impetus behind Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2023):

“In the city of Paris, on the corner of rue de la Jus Sienne—a linguistic deformation of Egyptians—and rue Montmartre, a plaque invites the passerby to envision a medieval chapel that had once occupied that space. According to the plaque, the chapel boasted a stained-glass image portraying a beautiful female saint facing a boatman across the deck of a ship with her skirt suggestively rolled up to just above the knees. Underneath the image, one could read the following explicatory text: ‘How the saint offered her body to the boatman in exchange for her passage.’ Centuries later, the image so scandalized a seventeenth-century Catholic priest that he had it destroyed. This disturbingly beautiful saint is the heroine of my book, Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt.

I have been fascinated by this saint’s evocative story—her conversion from dissolute youth to ascetic, holy old age—ever since encountering a thirteenth-century verse rendering of her vita in Spanish in graduate school. The anonymous poet dedicates a whole stanza to describing the contour of Mary of Egypt’s shoes. How to reconcile the poem’s didacticism with the sheer delight taken in describing her body and clothes? And how to make sense of her often overlooked presence in that “catechism of aesthetics” that is Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef d’œuvre inconnu, long recognized as a founding fable of modernist art? Along the way, I found the formidable image of her ascetic body imposing itself on the canvases of Valencian painter Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) and on the stage in a play by his contemporary, Juan Pérez de Montalbán, and I knew I had a project! Examining painting, poetry, drama, and narrative, I have sought to imagine with Saint Mary of Egypt alternative relationships between beauty and holiness to those represented by the Virgin Mary on the one hand (where beauty equals holiness), or Mary Magdalene (where beauty must be sacrificed for holiness to appear).”

Michel Chaouli

Michel Chaouli reflected on the nature of his recent Something Speaks to Me (University of Chicago Press, 2024):

“My new book is called Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins. I started from the idea — an intuition, really — that the question ‘What good is criticism?’, a question that had been bugging me for a while, is intimately linked to the question ‘What is good criticism?’ Put differently, the question of the justification of criticism arises only in the face of weak criticism. I thought (and still think) that strong criticism delivers its own justification.

This had consequences for the way the book is written. To elucidate the core idea, I could not merely argue it. I had to show it. Or rather, the idea had to show itself. This demanded another and, to me, new way of writing. The central challenge was no longer gathering evidence and shaping it into an argument, but rather developing the voice of the text. Whether this worked is something readers must judge.”

Akin Adesokan

Akin Adesokan commented on his Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters (Indiana University Press, 2023) and how he came to write it during the pandemic:

“I like to say that Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters  came out of conditions of impossibility. An undergraduate course is an atypical inspiration for a monograph on original research, but that was where we started. In Fall 2011, I taught an upper undergraduate course titled African Literature and Other Arts, with the premise that African literature, or literary studies in general, could be better appreciated as a non-autonomous field, especially given its relationship to what is often spoken of as ‘oral literature.’ Similarly, art forms like cinema, music, the visual arts, drew on the same modes, co-existed with literature, and thrived autonomously. Teaching the class over several years, we ran into issues of access: titles were out of print or published in places that were difficult to reach. Many films were never formatted as videos, much less as DVDs, and in some cases I would need to know an artist personally before I could gain access or the permission to include his or her work.

The bulk of the book was written during the pandemic. Although I was on sabbatical leave, libraries were closed, planned trips to archives overseas were abandoned, and digital books through the Hathi Trust access took months to manifest. In every way, writing and publishing the book mirrored the conditions that gave its subject-matter relevance—a book made out of fragments!”