front cover of The Maltese Touch of Evil
The Maltese Touch of Evil
Film Noir and Potential Criticism
Shannon Scott Clute and Richard L. Edwards
Dartmouth College Press, 2011
Noir is among the most popular, acclaimed, and critically assessed film styles of all time. The unfortunate consequence is an ever-growing divergence between fans and scholars with regard to goals and methods for appreciating and studying noir. The Maltese Touch of Evil aims to bridge that gap. Based on a series of popular podcasts, this unique and inspired investigation of film noir sets out to examine the case of noir more closely, and in the process reconfigures the critical evidence on noir that has been presented to date. The Maltese Touch of Evil reproduces and re-sequences nearly 150 still images from 31 great films, laying them out with the authors’ informed and entertaining insights into the significance of each shot. The result is a de facto meta–film noir, a celebration of the genre that shows how these films are themselves “constrained” texts whose carefully calculated visual forms simultaneously generate narrative and critical commentary on that narrative. You will never look at film noir the same way again.
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front cover of Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession
Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession
Neil Verma
University of Michigan Press, 2024
It has been a decade since Serial brought the narrative podcast to the center of popular culture. In that time, there has been an enormous boom in the production of podcasts that tell stories, particularly in the fields of true crime, storytelling, history, and narrative fiction. Now that the initial glow around the medium has begun to fade, it is time to reevaluate the medium’s technological, political, economic, and cultural rise, in particular what types of storytelling accompanied that rise. 

Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession is the first book to look back on this prodigious body of material and attempt to make sense of it from a structural, historical, and analytical point of view. Focusing on more than 350 podcasts and other audio works released between Serial and the COVID pandemic, the book explores why so many of these podcasts seem “obsessed with obsession,” why they focus not only on informing listeners but also dramatizing the labor that goes into it, and why fiction podcasts work so hard to prove they are a brand new form, even as they revive features of radio from decades gone by. This work also examines the industry's reckoning with its own implication in systemic racism, misogyny, and other forms of discrimination. Employing innovative new critical techniques for close listening—including pitch tracking software and spectrograms—Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession makes a major contribution to podcast studies and media studies more broadly.
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front cover of Saving New Sounds
Saving New Sounds
Podcast Preservation and Historiography
Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Over seventy-five million Americans listen to podcasts every month, and the average weekly listener spends over six hours tuning into podcasts from the more than thirty million podcast episodes currently available. Yet despite the excitement over podcasting, the sounds of podcasting’s nascent history are vulnerable and they remain mystifyingly difficult to research and preserve. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, which are difficult to search with any rigor. Podcasts might seem to be highly available everywhere, but it’s necessary to preserve and analyze these resources now, or scholars will find themselves writing, researching, and thinking about a past they can’t fully see or hear.

This collection gathers the expertise of leading and emerging scholars in podcasting and digital audio in order to take stock of podcasting’s recent history and imagine future directions for the format. Essays trace some of the less amplified histories of the format and offer discussions of some of the hurdles podcasting faces nearly twenty years into its existence. Using their experiences building and using the PodcastRE database—one of the largest publicly accessible databases for searching and researching podcasts—the volume editors and contributors reflect on how they, as media historians and cultural researchers, can best preserve podcasting’s booming audio cultures and the countless voices and perspectives podcasting adds to our collective soundscape.

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