Close Readings (subscription‪)‬ London Review of Books

In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established.. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilising misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom.

Further reading in the LRB:

Emily Wilson: Ave, Jeeves!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n04/emily-wilson/ave-jeeves

James Davidson: Laugh as long as you can
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/james-davidson/laugh-as-long-as-you-can

The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power.

Read the text here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss ‘The Golden Notebook’, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day’.

Get the book: https://lrb.me/lessingcr

Further reading:

Anita Brookner: Women Against Men
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men

Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her

Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible

'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.
Read more:
Clare Bucknell on syphilis:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n14/clare-bucknell/colonel-cundum-s-domain
John Mullan on Sterne:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/john-mullan/shandying-it

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire and Swift. Emily and Tom share some of their favourite excerpts from the Dialogues, ‘A True History’ and other works – with trips to the moon, boundary-pushing religious scepticism and wildly improbable but not technically untrue readings of Homer – and discuss why they still read as fresh and funny today.

Get the book: https://lrb.me/luciancr

Further reading in the LRB:

Tim Whitmarsh: Target Practice
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/tim-whitmarsh/target-practice

James Davidson: Stomach-Churning
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n02/james-davidson/stomach-churning