Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
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Grand Podcast Abyss

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

    6 DAYS AGO

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

    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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I discuss the vicissitudes of Hemingway’s reputation, both sociopolitically (from midcentury man’s man to late-20th-century misogynist man to 21st-century trans woman) and aesthetically (from Nobel-winning great novelist to a writer now understood as a great writer of short stories and prose poetry rather than major novels). I explain his stylistic revolution in English prose, its relation to other currents in modernism, and its global influence. I briefly rehearse his biography. I discuss how he understood his own relation to Russian, European, British, and American literary traditions. Then I turn to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, first considering its early reception by critics like Edmund Wilson and Leslie Fiedler to frame my own interpretation. Then, via its epigraphs from Gertrude Stein and Ecclesiastes. I discuss the novel as paradigm of the generationally self-mythologizing documentary “scene” report, to be repeated later in movements like the Beats or Alt Lit. I read the novel as a despairing post-Great-War testament akin to The Waste Land and an ironic treatment of modernity’s instability of gender. I consider the sentimentalism paradoxically generated by its hard-boiled treatment of its wounded hero, its lament over the death of religion, and its investment in the cycles of nature and the traditional art of the bullfight. Finally, I invert the novel’s anti-Semitic scapegoating of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn, who represents a form of heroism abandoned by or unavailable to the narrator and other male characters who stigmatize him. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever is forthcoming in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    18 min
  2. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Robert Frost

    NOV 8

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Robert Frost

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, free in its entirety, concerns the poetry of Robert Frost. I discuss the paradox of Frost’s career as an immensely popular poet whose poetry is also puzzling, difficult, and dark beneath its surface, an oxymoronic populist modernism. Via a selection of some of Frost’s most famous poems—lyric, narrative, and dramatic—I consider the many poetic personalities of Frost: popular, epigrammatic, romantic, realist, modernist, and political. I judge him an inheritor and critic of Romanticism, and a wry, chastened anti-gnostic. I make some timely remarks about his political evolution from “Grover Cleveland Democrat” to critic of what he saw as his party’s turn away from populism to overweening bureaucracy and administration in the New Deal. Finally, I explain and even defend his conviction that good poetry (or good literature in general) combines sound and sense, structure and feeling, as this episode’s titular “momentary stay against confusion.” Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

    2h 7m
  3. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry James's The Bostonians

    NOV 1

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry James's The Bostonians

    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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. First I make some impromptu comments on the Merchant Ivory film of the novel, film adaptations of fiction in general, and why James lends himself less well to cinema than E. M. Forster. Then I discuss James’s biography, along with his illustrious family, and the three major phases of his work from social realism to psychological realism to modernism. I also consider his famous focus on the “International Theme,” the confrontation of America with Europe. Then I turn to his middle-period masterpiece, one of his few exclusively set in America, The Bostonians. I explore this post-Civil-War drama of a straight conservative Southern man’s conflict with a Northern lesbian feminist radical over the affections and alleigances of a mysterious mesmerist’s preternaturally gifted and beautiful daughter. I trace the central conflict to Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. I interpret the novel as a tragicomic elegy for all lost causes, Northern and Southern, right and left: a radical and reactionary critique of a modernizing America more and more given to the sensational, the instrumental, and the profitable. Transcending ideology to encompass both and all sides within his expansive consciousness, and offering aesthetic self-sacrifice instead of radical activism or reactionary nostalgia, James consecrates the novel form as the true national and international union. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    14 min
  4. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Emily Dickinson

    OCT 25

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Emily Dickinson

    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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I discuss Dickinson’s biography, with an emphasis on the shadow cast by Calvinism over her milieu, as well as her literary influences, her poetic practices, and the textual and reception history of her work compared to other American writers and other Anglophone female poets of the 19th century. Then I discuss a selection of 20 of her poems under the headings of “God,” “Nature,” “Love,” “Pain,” and “Poetics,” emphasizing her anguished and ludic religious doubt, her play with personae and identities, her sense of nature’s otherness, her attitude toward her poetic vocation, her sexual and social vision for women, and her obsession with pain and death. Finally, I consider criticism on Dickinson by Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, and Camille Paglia, and these critics’ own comparison of the poet to a wide range of other authors—Sade, Whitman, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Stein, Emily Brontë, Jonathan Edwards, William James, and more—in quest of her unique vision. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Henry James, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    9 min
  5. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Walt Whitman

    OCT 18

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Walt Whitman

    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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Walt Whitman, particularly his epic-lyric Song of Myself. First I set the scene of 19th-century American poetry, and then I discuss Whitman’s biography and his life-long 40 years’ work on Leaves of Grass. I also establish that Whitman’s celebrated “free verse” is not as free as it seems but is carefully controlled by a series of potent poetic techniques rooted in tradition. Then we read excerpts of his manifesto-like Preface to Leaves of Grass with its call for a poetry commensurate with an America that is itself the greatest poem. Next we sample resonant passages from Song of Myself. I explore Whitman’s complex concept of the self; his embrace of all forms of otherness from the sexual to the racial to the social to the natural; his use of symbolism (especially the symbol of grass itself) and its relation to that of contemporaneous writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville; his intense auto-eroticism and bodily address to the reader; and his sense of the poet’s mission and destiny. Finally, I examine two other poems: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with its revision of Poe’s “Raven” and expansion of Whitman’s poetic to include the Gothic and decadent, and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a richly symbolic pastoral elegy for Lincoln and all those lost in the Civil War. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes Emily Dickinson and Henry James, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    11 min
  6. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (3)

    OCT 11

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode is the third in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; the first 25 minutes are available to all, the total two hours and 15 minutes reserved for paid subscribers. Here we discuss Shakespeare’s overwhelming influence on Melville, especially the final third of this novel. We also read Melville’s manifesto, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which argues that an American Shakespeare will succeed the bard because liberated by the Declaration of Independence and “republican progressivism” to tell the truth. We also consider Melville’s homoerotic paean to Hawthorne and his praise of the writer’s “power of blackness.” This leads back to Moby-Dick: to its homoerotic phallicism and its transvaluation of racial values. With help from D. H. Lawrence and Toni Morrison, we discover in Melville a partisan of black revolution. We also consider Ishmael’s pluralism, pragmatism, and perspectivism as a narrator; another critical passage, this time from James Wood, finds atheism and polytheism in Melville’s flood of metaphor. We dwell on the novel’s epic and tragic sublimity, its quarrel with Emerson over self-reliance, and its conflict between individual and community. With Charles Olson, we examine its occult subtext, as Ahab takes the left-hand and Ishmael the right-hand path. Finally, we read the ending—and, following a suggestion from a commenter, test the idea that Ishmael and Ahab are doubles, the myriad-minded narrator what the monomaniacal captain would be if he’d survived his tragic apotheosis. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    26 min
  7. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (2)

    OCT 4

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode—over two hours for paid subscribers, with a 15-minute preview for free subscribers—is the second in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First we discuss the unity and disunity of Moby-Dick—whether or not the novel is, as Melville said, a “botch”—with remarks on its relation to 20th-century critical trends like New Criticism and deconstruction. I offer my own view as a novelist about the question of whether or not works of literature should seek coherence or contradiction, unity or aporia. Then we consider the strange identity of the novel’s three main personae—Ishmael, Ahab, and the titular whale itself—and the novel’s vein of Orientalism centered on the figure of Fedallah. Next we explore the mood of pessimism and misanthropy that marks the novel’s middle third, abrading the revolutionary cosmopolitan optimism of the first third, and investigate the themes of fate, free will, and chance. For the rest of the episode, I examine Ishmael’s cetology chapters and their metafictional relation to realism and allegory, their theological implications, and their anti-philosophical bias. I further detect unexpected elements of the sentimental and the feminine—not to mention the ecological—in this otherwise radical, masculinist, and gnostic epic. Finally, I note the novel’s ambitious civilizational syncretism, uniting Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, and Christian myth. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including the finale of Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    15 min
  8. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1)

    SEP 27

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1)

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, free in its entirety, is the first in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First I make some general remarks about Moby-Dick, its multiple genres and influences (the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton), and how difficult it is to read relative to other “difficult” classics. Then I discuss Melville’s biography, with an emphasis on “the tormented psychology of the decaying patrician,” to quote a critic, as well as his experiences with non-western cultures and his struggles with family and authority, and I make some remarks on his other works. I give a primer on the Biblical precedents for Moby-Dick’s three central characters—Ishmael, Ahab, and Leviathan—and summarize Melville’s radical redaction of Judeo-Christian tradition: his siding against the chosen and with the outcast and his speculations on a covenant with nature. I note the book’s multiple modes and traditions: epic, romance, satire, anatomy, tragedy, and realism. I then summarize the first third of Moby-Dick and consider its “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and opening paragraph. I survey themes of wonder and sublimity, the escape from domesticity and femininity, cosmopolitanism and queer desire, democracy and kingship, the modernization of tragedy, relativism vs. absolutism, and Melville’s proto-modernist critique both of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Finally, I try to solve the puzzle of the novel’s most esoteric passage: what is “the old State-secret”? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including parts two and three on Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

    2h 53m
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4.8
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About

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Grand Podcast Abyss
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2024
  • Episodes
    63
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Show Website
    Grand Podcast Abyss

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