Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
  • 4.8 (16)
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  • UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (2)

    13M AGO

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (2)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s themes of Russian political, economic, and social reform; women’s place in society; the relationship between religion and conscience; the limitations of ideology as against a direct experience of reality; the importance of art as a disclosure of truth; the wisdom of childhood; and more. The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  2. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1)

    FEB 13

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s style, symbols, and motifs; its portraits of nature and labor, sex and death, aristocracy and peasantry, ideology and life, virtue and religion, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  3. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (4)

    FEB 6

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (4)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the final in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. It primarily concerns the novel’s culminating theme: the Bildungsroman, with its cultivation of the hero’s soul, as a secularized alchemical transformation of matter into spirit, not to mention this Bildung’s prospect in a modernity characterized by the decadence of culture and the frenzy of apocalyptic war. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    20 min
  4. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (3)

    JAN 30

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (3)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Here we examine the intense paradoxes of the novel’s political debate between liberal humanism and Catholic communist totalitarianism; its sublime excursion into nature; its vision of civilization as sustained by sacrificial violence; its epiphanic exaltation of love over any one ideological position; its depiction of a major character’s death; its intimation of the persistence of secret societies and ancient mystery cults in modern politics and religion; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  5. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (2)

    JAN 23

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (2)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We further examine the novel’s philosophy of time; discuss its critique of Enlightenment progress and vision of cutting-edge technology (x-rays, cinema) as a paradoxically archaic, atavistic, and magical phenomenon; explore its Orientalism (especially as applied to Russia) and eroticism; consider its thesis on life as a sexual excitation and disease of matter; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  6. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1)

    JAN 16

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We discuss Mann’s life, times, and other works; consider questions of translation; and introduce the novel’s themes of bourgeois reason and moderation vs. illness, sex, death, and the exotic, in terms both private and public, personal and political. We also elaborate on the novel’s modernist form, its enactment or performance of a temporal philosophy, despite its superficially traditional realism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    20 min
  7. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Toni Morrison's Paradise

    12/12/2025

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Toni Morrison's Paradise

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Paradise by Toni Morrison, a neglected and most mysterious masterpiece. We consider the novel’s place in Morrison’s oeuvre as both capstone and reversal, and its mixed reception by its first critics as a too-baldly mythic betrayal of novelistic realism. Then we discuss the thematic place of gender, race, and religion in the complex narrative, encompassing how Morrison’s propensity for victim-blaming rescues the novel from didacticism; how her elusive portrayal of racial identity interrogates the reader’s own ideology of race; how the novel’s plot parodies and critiques the Exodus narrative at the fount of Abrahamic religion, American national myth, and the African-American freedom struggle; and how Paradise finally offers itself as the ambiguous, riddling scripture of the next faith, a syncretic gnostic-infused non-dualistic neo-Christianity presided over by a Black Madonna. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    11 min
  8. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Don DeLillo's The Names

    12/05/2025

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Don DeLillo's The Names

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Names, usually considered Don DeLillo’s first major novel. We begin by placing DeLillo in the possible contexts of “theory fiction” and “Italian-American literature,” neither of which may exist, and then consider his biography. Then we discuss the several genres The Names makes use of (expatriate novel, political thriller, imperial romance, domestic novel) to embody its themes of American corporate imperialism, the postmodern condition, the relation between art and violence, and language as a spiritual force granting access to the numinous and divine. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    12 min
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4.8
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Grand Podcast Abyss
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Show Website
    Grand Podcast Abyss