52 min listen
89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)
89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)
ratings:
Length:
48 minutes
Released:
Sep 15, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine.
The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”
Mentioned in this Episode:
--Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
--W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)
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The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”
Mentioned in this Episode:
--Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
--W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Released:
Sep 15, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Charles J. Shields, “And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut, A Life” (Henry Holt, 2011): The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man. Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’s insightful new biography, And So It Goes. by New Books in Literary Studies