Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
  • 4.8 (16)
  • Books
  • Updated Semiweekly

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot and Sarrasine

    May 29

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot and Sarrasine

    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 about Honoré de Balzac’s most famous novel, Père Goriot, exemplary of his pioneering realist style, and his novella Sarrasine, exemplary of his more decadent tale-telling vein. We first consider the eccentric and prodigious Balzac’s life and times and his ambition to write a Human Comedy. Then we explore Père Goriot’s portrayal of the modern city as labyrinth, its conflicts between the rival quests for love and power, its interest in crime and cynicism and cruelty, and its contest between realistic-scientific and allegorical-religious modes of literary representation. Next we turn to Sarrasine’s sensationalist tale of an sculptor in erotic pursuit of an ideally beautiful singer who isn’t what she seems. Finally, we dwell on the commentary Sarrasine occasioned by Roland Barthes, for whom it exemplified the ruse of Balzacian realism, and Camille Paglia, for whom it demonstrated Balzac’s commitment to androgyny and artistic production rather than the gender binary and sexual reproduction, Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  2. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Sand's Indiana

    May 15

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Sand's Indiana

    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 about George Sand’s novel Indiana. We discuss Sand—the most popular European novelist in her time—as exemplary of the fate of Romantic, idealist, popular, and women’s fiction after the later 19th- and early 20th-century dominance of realism, naturalism, and modernism. We consider Sand’s androgyny, progressivism, and feminism, and her reception by Anglophone writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. We explore Indiana as a novel in which realism and romance battle for aesthetic hegemony. We examine its place in the French politics of its time—the end of the Bourbon Restoration—and its own ideologies of gender, empire, nation, race, and class. We finally weigh the continued viability of the aesthetics of romance and idealism today. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
  3. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Stendhal's The Red and the Black

    May 8

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Stendhal's The Red and the Black

    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 15 minutes are free, is about Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. We speculate on Stendhal as both the first modern novelist and as the inaugural figure of the modern artist qua reactionary-revolutionary aristocrat-radical aesthete standing athwart bourgeois society. We stress the novel’s psychological analysis, metafictional technique, gender ambiguity, and political and religious critique, as well as Stendhal’s general prescience as a writer looking forward to (and influencing) later figures from Balzac to Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wilde to Camus. We emphasize Stendhal’s elevation of love, art, and nature over the quest for advancement within the social world. We quote Erich Auerbach and René Girard as important critical authorities on the novel. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    16 min
  4. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Paradiso

    Apr 24

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Paradiso

    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 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Paradiso. We consider the arrangement of Dante’s heaven, his political views, and his treatment of theological controversies over damnation and salvation. We further explore the poet’s conception of the poem as an epic quest and its bearing on issues of gender and spirituality. Finally, we consider major modern critics on Dante: T. S. Eliot, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, and Harold Bloom. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    16 min
  5. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Purgatorio

    Apr 17

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Purgatorio

    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 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Purgatorio. We dwell, in this most human of the Divine Comedy’s three canticles, on Dante’s portrayal of poetic tradition and lineage, his critique of reason, and the tension between his realistic and allegorical tendencies. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    16 min
  6. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Inferno

    Apr 10

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante's Inferno

    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 about Dante’s Inferno. We consider the conceptual and philosophical basis of Dante’s afterlife, his sense of sin and punishment, his placement of himself within the western poetic lineage, his attack on avarice as the ruin of secular and spiritual power, and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    20 min
  7. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante

    Apr 9

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Dante

    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 free bonus episode, the prologue to a three-part series on the Divine Comedy, is about the life, times, and poetics of Dante. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription to access the rest of the Invisible College archive, including our three future Dante episodes. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode 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

    1h 33m
  8. THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Virgil's Aeneid

    Apr 3

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Virgil's Aeneid

    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 on Virgil’s Aeneid. We discuss the distinction between the Greek and Roman character; Virgil’s posthumous canonization as prophet and magician; his belated contrivance on Homer’s model of a founding epic for Rome and its possible source in elite and imperial patronage; the poem’s decadent evasion of the martial destiny it narrates; its ambiguous portrait of love and war; the metaphysics of its underworld; its contest of masculine and feminine and interest in queerness; the mythical archetypes (Venus, Juno, Saturn, Mars, Diana) it mobilizes; and more. We end with Paglia’s stern reading of its sexual personae and Borges’s warm tribute to Virgil as patron of poetry. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    10 min
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About

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Grand Podcast Abyss
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    128
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Show Website
    Grand Podcast Abyss