Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
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Grand Podcast Abyss

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Wallace Stevens

    DEC 13

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Wallace Stevens

    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 20 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. We begin with a contrast between Pound Stevens and its sequel in 20th-century literary criticism, as well as a consideration of the role played by social prejudice in Pound and Eliot on one hand and Stevens on the other. Then we discuss Stevens’s biography, a passionate inner life lived solely in poetry. We read three short early poems for what they tell us about the proper and improper uses of imagination in Stevens, and then consider his classic “Sunday Morning” for its attempt to replace religion with artistic imagination. We go on to his greater statements on the power of the poetic imagination to re-shape reality as against both totalizing religion and totalizing politics in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, 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 awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    21 min
  2. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ezra Pound

    DEC 6

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ezra Pound

    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 16 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Ezra Pound. We begin at the ending, with the tragedy of Pound’s later-life political dereliction and incarceration. We ask not only how these events happened, but also why this most extraordinarily gifted of poets did not become his century’s greatest, his politics notwithstanding. Then I discuss Pound’s biography and trace his poetic and intellectual development from his early poetry through The Cantos, with a triple focus on 1. his love of Troubadour poetry and the esoteric Cathar gnostic mystical goddess cult he detected beneath it it; 2. his interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a resource for restoring English verse back to its accentual and alliterative strength after more than half a millennium of imposed iambic pentameter and rhyme; 3. and his engagement with Chinese poetry and what he thought its ideograms portended for a poetry of the image. We also discuss, with help from Hugh Kenner, his inner conflict between Romanticism-Taoism-anarchism, on the one hand, and Classicism-Confucianism-fascism, on the other. His obsession with an obscure economic theory and its influence on his politics after the calamitous Great War is also considered, as is the failure of The Cantos to find a readership even other difficult high modernist great books have. What, finally, can we all learn from Pound’s failure? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, with forthcoming episodes on 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 awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:

    16 min
  3. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

    NOV 22

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

    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 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I discuss the novel’s ubiquity and whether or not it is overrated, as well as why this is such a common contrarian opinion. I put the novel in the context of Fitzgerald’s influences from Keats to Conrad and Eliot and consider the cosmopolitanism of Fitzgerald and other American writers before the Cold War institutionalization of the 19th-century American canon. I rehearse Fitzgerald’s glamorous and tragic biography. Turning to The Great Gatsby, I elaborate on its sophisticated narrative technique and its inner quarrel between Romantic idealism and modernist irony. I trace themes of the modernist waste land; modernity, urbanity, and self-fashioning; ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the automobile as symbol of care and carelessness; the moral reliability of the novel’s narrator; conflicts between the Old World and the New and between the west and the east in New World; and the relation of aesthetic form and the beauty of wealth to money itself as an abstract medium for exchanging values. 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 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:

    10 min
  4. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

    NOV 15

    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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
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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 - 2024
  • Episodes
    66
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Show Website
    Grand Podcast Abyss

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