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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Desolation Tries to Colonize You: Jeff VanderMeer and Alison Sperling (CH)
Description: Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called âthe weird Thoreauâ, Jeff VanderMeer, and a scholar of the modernist weird, Alison Sperling (FSU). With ND host Chris Holmes, Jeff and Alison delve into how the ugly politics of Lovecraftâs âoldâ weird gives rise to the stylistic panoply of the New Weird movement. Jeff discusses the ways in which nature writing's sublime and ecstatic moments are their own category of the weird. The three consider ways to represent unrepresentable species, the limits of human intelligence in perceiving animal intelligence, the nonhuman narr...