So maybe also if you could get at why you chose those texts and how they maybe are a particularly good place to go for the kind of argument you're making.

I'm interested in modernity and specifically industrial modernity.

Modernity is notoriously a very difficult concept to define, of course.

But I'm looking at industrial modernity, and especially in the case of the two out of the three countries or cultures I'm looking at, there's a phenomenon that's been described by scholars as belated modernity, right? I'm speaking about Italy and Poland here, where we see certain transformations of cultural and social life that occurred in other countries within the region, so other countries in Europe in this case, a couple decades earlier.

but kind of linger and occur a little later in these two cases.

So in the Italian case, that's perhaps the most, the clearest one.

We can see the disappearance of local cultures and local languages after World War II, right? The traditional scholarly narrative about this is that the promulgation that the Expansion of the reach of national TV and radio meant that standard Italian entered the homes of Italians across all regions.

Do you want to say something about how the argument unfolds across the book? And do you have a favorite chapter that you maybe want to?

So maybe also if you could get at why you chose those texts and how they maybe are a particularly good place to go for the kind of argument you're making.

I'm interested in modernity and specifically industrial modernity.

Modernity is notoriously a very difficult concept to define, of course.

But I'm looking at industrial modernity, and especially in the case of the two out of the three countries or cultures I'm looking at, there's a phenomenon that's been described by scholars as belated modernity, right? I'm speaking about Italy and Poland here, where we see certain transformations of cultural and social life that occurred in other countries within the region, so other countries in Europe in this case, a couple decades earlier.

but kind of linger and occur a little later in these two cases.

So in the Italian case, that's perhaps the clearest one.

We can see the disappearance of local cultures and local languages after World War II.

In a sort of a related

Donc peut-être aussi, si vous pouviez nous expliquer pourquoi vous avez choisi ces textes et comment ils sont peut-être un endroit particulièrement bon pour le type d'argument que vous faites.

Je suis intéressé par la modernité, et spécifiquement la modernité industrielle.

La modernité est un concept très difficile à définir, bien sûr.

Mais je regarde la modernité industrielle, et surtout dans le cas des deux des trois pays ou des cultures que je regarde, il y a un phénomène qui a été décrit par les chercheurs comme la modernité belayée.

Je parle d'Italie et de Pologne ici, où nous voyons certaines transformations de la vie culturelle et sociale qui ont eu lieu dans d'autres pays dans la région, donc d'autres pays en Europe dans ce cas, il y a quelques décennies plus tôt.

but kind of linger and occur a little later in these two cases.

So, in the Italian case, that's perhaps the most, the clearest one.

Est-ce que tu veux dire quelque chose sur comment l'argument se déroule dans le livre? Et as-tu un chapitre préféré que tu voudrais peut-être...

Well, I'd like to start off by asking you about the origin story for your book, how it got started, what drew you to your interest in failure, and how did this topic begin to take root for you?

Yeah.

So, you know, the book goes back in many ways to my college classes in American literature.

I did a degree in English studies and I early on became really fascinated and drawn to figures like Bartleby the Scrivener or Billy Budd, really works by Herman Melville, really, really interested me.

I actually once went on this rabbit hole reading about the scholarship on Bartleby and And this fascination with negativity and escapism and failure and figures in literature that kind of, you know, take a step back was the initial kind of impulse here.

And that was also coupled with a certain frustration with individual heroism or stories of individual heroism, which were mostly gendered as masculine.

And even if they sought to kind of undermine, you know, oppression, systemic oppression, it was always this kind of heroic fight of this, you know, one man against the world that ended up reprojecting the very same forms of hegemonic white ways of doing political action.

So maybe also if you could get at why you chose those texts and how they maybe are a particularly good place to go for the kind of argument you're making.

So maybe also if you could get at why you chose those texts and how they maybe are a particularly good place to go for the kind of argument you're making.

I'm interested in modernity and specifically industrial modernity.

Modernity is notoriously a very difficult concept to define, of course.

But I'm looking at industrial modernity, and especially in the case of the two out of the three countries or cultures I'm looking at, there's a phenomenon that's been described by scholars as belated modernity, right? I'm speaking about Italy and Poland here, where we see certain transformations of cultural and social life that occurred in other countries within the region, so other countries in Europe in this case, a couple decades earlier.

but kind of linger and occur a little later in these two cases.

So in the Italian case, that's perhaps the clearest one.

We can see the disappearance of local cultures and local languages after World War II.

In a sort of a related

So maybe also if you could get at why you chose those texts and how they maybe are a particularly good place to go for the kind of argument you're making.

I'm interested in modernity and specifically industrial modernity.

Modernity is notoriously a very difficult concept to define, of course.

But I'm looking at industrial modernity, and especially in the case of the two out of the three countries or cultures I'm looking at, there's a phenomenon that's been described by scholars as belated modernity, right? I'm speaking about Italy and Poland here, where we see certain transformations of cultural and social life that occurred in other countries within the region, so other countries in Europe in this case, a couple decades earlier.

but kind of linger and occur a little later in these two cases.

So in the Italian case, that's perhaps the clearest one.

We can see the disappearance of local cultures and local languages after World War II, right? The traditional scholarly narrative about this is that the promulgation that the Expansion of the reach of national TV and radio meant that standard Italian entered the homes of Italians across all regions.

And