John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s terrific 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith , so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.

Discussed in this episode:

• Tony Judt, Postwar
• Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
• Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
• Doris Lessing The Fifth Child
• Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means
• Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel
• Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)
• Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
• J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom
• Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”
• Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost

Listen to the episode here:

You can read the transcript here:

RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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