Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
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Grand Podcast Abyss

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

    2D AGO

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

    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, the eighth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, two revolutionary works of the modern theater, whose realism, I argue, assembles the properties of social drama only to clear them away in preparation for the void of modernism. The first 10 minutes are free. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  2. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Short Novels

    APR 18

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Leo Tolstoy's Short Novels

    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, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns three of Tolstoy’s short novels: The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad. I discuss many things but mostly my latter-day aversion to the Count. First 10 minutes are free, the following two-plus hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: we return to drama with Chekhov and Ibsen. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  3. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (2)

    APR 11

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (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 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the second half of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We focus on the novel’s more and more “Dostoevskean” tone with scenes of collective hysteria, as well as its developing Christian didacticism. We consider Nabokov’s criticism in more detail: is Raskolnikov’s motive coherent? We explore Dostoevsky’s satire of the materialist left and of the figure of Romantic evil. We dream Raskolnikov’s dream. First 10 minutes are free, the following two hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: Tolstoy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  4. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1)

    APR 4

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (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 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the sixth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the first half of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We consider the novel’s context in Russian religious, cultural, and literary history alongside the author’s biography; then we investigate its dialogic, interior, and oneiric literary techniques, spanning sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and its themes, including alcoholism, sexual exploitation, the nature of crime, the instability of the self, and the deficiencies of modern western worldviews like materialism, socialism, and the worship of great men. The first 27 minutes, including an argument against the received idea that Dostoevsky is a writer for adolescents, are free; a paid subscription will grant you access to the rest—and to The Invisible College’s ever-expanding archive of episodes on the classics. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    28 min
  5. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

    MAR 21

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

    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, the fourth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I discuss Flaubert’s position at the intersection of Romanticism, realism, and modernism; his hatred of the bourgeoisie; his nihilism and irony; his war against cliché and search for le mot juste; his skepticism about language and progress; the novel’s obscenity trial and lack of a moral viewpoint; its several famous set pieces; and much more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    9 min
  6. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas

    MAR 14

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas

    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, the third in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas and ancillary texts including the classic essay “On the Marionette Theater.” I explain the nihilism that befell Kleist after his reading of Kant, his anticipation of modernist irony in figures like Kafka, his Romantic conflict with Goethe’s classicism, and his troubled life. Then I show Michael Kohlhaas to concern the irony of a quest for justice that produces injustice and the consequence of a solipsistic post-Kantian interpretation of the Reformation as licensing absolute individuality. Along the way, I interpret later novels influenced by Michael Kohlhaas, like Doctorow’s Ragtime and Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, I analyze minute but consequential differences in two translations of the text, and more. I conclude with Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater and its suggestion that we will use art to reattain our prelapsarian innocence, having observed the vanity of thought disclosed by modern philosophy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    12 min
  7. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part II

    MAR 7

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part II

    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, the second in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part II by Goethe. I unravel crucial themes in this famously difficult experimental dramatic poem: the philosophy of money, the conflict between youth and age, the creation of artificial life, the conflict between Classic and Gothic cultures, the end of Romanticism, the potential and costs of technological progress, the multifarious representation of masculine and feminine, and the question of salvation. Plus, critical commentary from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, Harold Bloom, and Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle, who designates Faust, Part II not an example of Classical, Enlightenment, or Romantic literature but rather a quintessentially postmodern work. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  8. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part I

    FEB 28

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part I

    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, the first in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part I by Goethe. I explain Goethe’s place in world literature among the most major writers, his rich historical context in the moment of German Romanticism and Weimar Classicism, and his extraordinarily various achievements in almost every field of literature as well as in science and thought. Then I recount the history of the Faust legend and explain Goethe’s innovations on the myth. Finally, we consider the many themes and modes of the first part of the dramatic poem: the mission of the poet, the value of negation, the meaning of magic, the truth of nature, everything from neo-Shakespearean tragedy to bourgeois romance to proto-surrealist phantasmagoria, not to mention the mystery of salvation. Next week: Faust, Part II. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    11 min
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    4.8
    out of 5
    16 Ratings

    About

    literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

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    • Creator
      Grand Podcast Abyss
    • Years Active
      2022 - 2025
    • Episodes
      81
    • Rating
      Explicit
    • Copyright
      © Grand Hotel Abyss
    • Show Website
      Grand Podcast Abyss

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