Afleveringen

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Edgar Allan Poe

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Edgar Allan Poe

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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, the third in a 16-week sequence on American literature, focuses on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. With help from writers as diverse as Borges, MallarmĂ©, and Lovecraft, I emphasize Poe’s extraordinary influence on world literature across several different domains from pulp fiction to avant-garde poetry. From his poem “The Raven” and his literary theoretical manifesto “The Philosophy of Composition,” I derive Poe’s formalist and polysemous aesthetics that would go on to influence modernist poetry and postmodernist literary theory, a conflict with the Transcendentalists cleaving the root of modernism and leading to further divisions like those between poets Pound and Stevens or critics Guy Davenport and Harold Bloom. In the Gothic stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” I identify his parodic recasting of older narrative forms, his aestheticism and exoticism, his cultural syncretism, his dark animism and vitalism, and his pervasive irony. In his mystery “The Purloined Letter,” I trace his invention of the detective genre and his theory of a poetry of the surface as reason’s highest form, surpassing mathematics and science. Finally, in his experimental tale “The Man of the Crowd,” I find the origins of urban and psychological fiction that looks forward to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Joyce. In passing, I remark upon the ironized and commercialized simulacrum of traditionalism that places Poe at the origin of a uniquely American right-wing politics. 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 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 here:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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, the second in a 16-week sequence on American literature and the second of two on the Transcendentalist movement, focuses on essays by Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. The first 10 minutes are available as a free preview. We consider Thoreau’s libertarianism, his anti-sentimental radicalism, his influence on passive resistance, his heroic vitalism, his classicism, his startling hatred of nature, and his final vision of nature as an excremental mother. Then we turn to Fuller’s feminism, her survey of ideal cultural images of women from antiquity to her own time, her insistence that women’s development of Emersonian self-culture and self-reliance will necessarily lead them away from motherhood, her view of the masculine and feminine as principles and forces, and her concept of the two leading feminine archetypes, Muse and Minerva. 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 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 here:

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  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ralph Waldo Emerson

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ralph Waldo Emerson

    · Grand Podcast Abyss

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This free episode, the first in a 16-week sequence on American literature and the first of two on the Transcendentalist movement, focuses on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. First I review the origins of American intellectual culture in Puritanism and its historical connections to the Unitarianism of young Emerson’s milieu. Then I examine the nature and influences of the broader Transcendentalist movement, with an emphasis on the paradox of an attempt to create a uniquely American culture by assimilating global influences from British Romanticism to German Idealism to the broader western and eastern metaphysical traditions. I look at three essays of Emerson’s, stressing the underlying spiritual convictions neglect of which has led his concept of “self-reliance” to be misunderstood. I consider their historical context in the Jacksonian populist moment, their prose-poetic style of expansion and contract, and some of their potential self-contradictions, particularly around the self-relying American’s public obligations. I conclude with a discussion of his call for a new poet-as-prophet to capture modern American realities. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and, if you enjoyed this free episode, please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including 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 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (4)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (4)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). We consider the status of Middlemarch in the 21st century amid controversies about religion and public life and an emphasis on literature as offering an ethic of “empathy,” an ethic Middlemarch, with its emphasis on what constrains and therefore enframes the feeling self, may complicate; we consider Joyce Carol Oates’s relative demotion of the novel among its rivals; we discuss Eliot’s portrayal of women in marriage and her portrayal of marriage itself as a practice of necessary self-sacrifice; we revisit the question of the novel’s politics and its “conservative reformism”; we revisit the question of its Christian ethics without Christianity; and, in conclusion, we link these post-Christian Christian ethics to a potential politics of culture, literature, and education akin to that of other Victorian intellectuals, all in service to “the growing good of the world.” Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick, beginning next week with Emerson, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and the first three episodes on Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (3)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (3)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). We consider the representation of early democratic politics in the novel and perhaps the birth of political moderation (“Burke with a leaven of Shelley”); Eliot’s depiction of technological and social progress as typified by the coming of the railroad, with a comparison to the contemporary political archetype of the “hicklib,” and a discussion of the universal Christianity Eliot seems to promote; the novel’s view of art itself as frivolous and damaging when not connected to reality and to a higher purpose; and Eliot’s ambiguous portrayal of love and marriage, rooted and rootless, realist and Romantic, conservative and rebellious. Finally, we consider some early criticism of Middlemarch: an anonymous Victorian reviewers and Leslie Stephen (AKA Virginia Woolf’s father) pronouncing it too didactic and theoretical, and a young Henry James deeming it excessively attentive to the trivial. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of our reading of Middlemarch, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (2)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (2)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture, of which the first 14 minutes are free, is the second of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). I discuss Middlemarch’s indirect portrayal of history in the context of Georg Lukács’s theory of historical f


  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (1)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: George Eliot's Middlemarch (1)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the first of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), sometimes called the greatest English novel. I discuss Eliot’s biography and her context in a secularizing intellectual milieu; compare her to Dickens among great Victorian novelists; and consider Middlemarch’s place in the history of fiction. Then I summarize Books I and II of Middlemarch, address its themes of gender and of vocation, explore its approach to the mutually constitutive interplay of individual and society, and investigate the narrator’s implicit theory of the novelist as social and natural scientist and renovated Romantic poet. This episode is the only free one in the Eliot sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of our reading of Middlemarch, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (5)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (5)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the seventh in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes 13 through 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, I consider Ulysses as less a book than a sequence of experimental short stories and novellas; then I recapitulate the argument that the style of the novel becomes more autonomous as it goes on, its form swallowing its content. Next we turn to the “Nausicaa” chapter, which first attracted the book’s proscription by American authorities; I explain Joyce’s proto-feminist mockery of women’s domestic sentimental fiction and his portrayal of Bloom’s masturbatory sexuality. Then we investigate the comparison made between the gestation of a fetus and the development of the English language in “Oxen of the Sun” with its panoply of parodies and pastiches. I criticize this conceit and suggest it hints at a Joycean desire to make artistic creation superior to sexual reproduction. Finally, in the phantasmagoria of “Circe,” we consider Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s hallucinations—sexual, political, artistic, and otherwise—including Bloom’s transgender masochism and utopian fantasy of the New Bloomusalem and Stephen’s triumph over his mother’s shade and epiphany about where and how to “kill the priest and the king.” The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (4)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (4)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the sixth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes 10 through 12 of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, we recapitulate Joyce’s writing so far and examine the ways his works exemplify all the many meanings and practices of modernism, from the use of myth to the stream of consciousness to the mapping of the metropolis. We explore the 19 vignettes of the Ulysses-in-miniature that is “Wandering Rocks,” with a focus on the depiction of authority (the Catholic Church, the British Empire) and the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the labyrinthine city. Then we consider the fugue structure of “Sirens” and its omni-musical use of language to create the joyful Joycean nation, as well as its focus on fathers and children. Finally, we examine Joyce’s fierce satire of a bigoted and essentialist cultural nationalism in “Cyclops,” and Bloom’s humanistic passive resistance—all of it adding up to Joyce’s utopian horizon of the cosmopolitical enlightened nation. The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (3)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (3)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the fifth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes seven through nine of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, we hear James Joyce’s voice, reading from the “Aeolus” episode. Then I consider the following: the formal anti-realist turn represented by the use of interpolated headlines in “Aeolus,” plus the chapter’s motif of comparing and contrasting various empires and peoples and the way they are represented in the novel (Greek, Jewish, Roman, English, Irish); the narratively dense “Lestrygonians” and the information it relays about Bloom’s life and times, especially in one of the novel’s most moving, passionate, and beautiful passages; and “Scylla and Charabdys,” with its return to philosophical themes (Plato vs. Aristotle; idealism vs. empiricism; Romanticism vs. realism) and Stephen’s strikingly proto-postmodern theory of Shakespearean authorship, what I call “Dark Stratfordianism.” (You won’t want to miss my digressive tirade on Shakespeare authorship theories, nor my answer to the question: who is Shakespeare in Ulysses?) The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (2)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (2)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the fourth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes four through six of Joyce’s Ulysses. I begin by characterizing the lower-middle-class cultural milieu of the Bloom sections of the novel with its focus on popular and middlebrow as well as high culture, as opposed to the highbrow sections devoted to Stephen Dedalus. I more closely consider the novel’s possibly almost occult use of Homeric correspondences with help from Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. Then I investigate “Calypso,” particularly the introduction of Leopold Bloom as curious, kind, artistic, science-minded, socially outcast, and lower-middle-class Odysseus; the ambivalent-to-hostile evocation of Zionism; the subversive if potentially disturbing act of sexualizing domestic women, domestic children, and domestic spaces; and the theme of metempsychosis. In “The Lotus Eaters,” I focus on Bloom’s skeptical view of religion as opiate of the masses, as well as his pornographic correspondence as Henry Flower and his fancied erotic bath. Finally, I consider “Hades,” with its theme of fathers and sons, its pioneering use of the trauma plot, its secular conception of death, and the possibility that Ulysses overall is not just a revision of The Odyssey but also of Dante’s Inferno and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (1)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (1)

    · Grand Podcast Abyss

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the third in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is the first three chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” and “Proteus.” I first make some general remarks about the novel’s context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the book’s notorious difficulty. I summarize the first three chapters for first-time readers and then closely examine select passages. Themes raised in “Telemachus” include Stephen’s mourning for his mother and search for paternity, his sense of himself as a servant to three masters (the British Empire, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalism), and his complex revision of Irish nationalist myth in the figure of the Shan Van Vocht; I also consider the formal interplay between stream-of-consciousness and more conventional narrative prose. In “Nestor” I dwell on history as nightmare and the affinity Stephen perceives between the Irish and the Jews as a usurped and oppressed people. In “Proteus,” with its much more thoroughgoing stream-of-consciousness narration, I consider the war in Stephen’s mind between Plato and Aristotle, idealism and empiricism, Romanticism and realism, and their synthesis in the very form of this novel; I further investigate Stephen’s relations—filial, sexual, and amicable—with men and women; and I pause to remark on the unparalleled beauty and significance of Joyce’s language. This episode is the only free one in the Joyce sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of this summer’s tour through the most consequential novel of the 20th century, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, a forthcoming sequence on Middlemarch, and the fall focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the second in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is Joyce’s first novel, the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I discuss the novel’s history, from its first version, Stephen Hero, a 1000-page omnisciently narrated realist saga, to its revision as a dense, brief novel narrated entirely from within the language of consciousness of Joyce’s stand-in Stephen Dedalus, from the babytalk of his childhood to the philosophizing of his early adulthood. I explain Joyce’s modernist revision of the bildungsroman as genre: his schematic exposure of its structure and devices. I detail the paradoxes of a static portrait that is also a developmental bildungsroman, an interpenetration of time and eternity. I explore the relations between literature and painting. To demonstrate the type of close reading Joyce demands, I give a dramatic reading from a passage in my doctoral dissertation about the function of articles (a, the, a) in the novel’s title. Then I journey through the novel’s plot and structure, elaborating on themes, styles, and motifs, with attention to the narrative’s mythic dimension in the story of Daedalus and to the themes of gender and sexuality the novel raises. I also link the novel to Romanticism as both a fulfillment and critique of that earlier movement, with reference to Joyce’s Blakean, Byronic, and Shelleyean allusions. Finally, I discuss Stephen as Luciferian rebel, anti-nationalist apolitical radical, and aestheticizing philosopher. Next week, we will rejoin Stephen in the first three chapters of Ulysses. The first 14 minutes are free to all; please offer a paid subscription for the full episode. Please like, share, and comment—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Dubliners

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Dubliners

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is the first in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. I begin with some advice for reading Ulysses, which we will begin in two weeks. Mainly, however, this episode covers Joyce’s first major work, the short story collection Dubliners. I briefly discuss Joyce’s life. Then I explain the censorship troubles Dubliners faced, the influential theory of the “epiphany” informing its composition, and its structure as the bildungsroman of a city. I also consider the history and theory of the short story as a form. Finally, I examine select stories from the collection for their stylistic and thematic significance, from the decadent minimalism of “The Sisters” to the universal vision of “The Dead,” with comments on Joyce’s religion, politics, and sexuality. Next week, we will turn to Joyce’s autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first 20 minutes are free to all; please offer a paid subscription for the full episode. Please like, share, and comment—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Samuel Beckett

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Samuel Beckett

    · Grand Podcast Abyss

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Samuel Beckett, with a focus on his play Waiting for Godot. We begin by considering Beckett’s place in literary history as an experimentalist trying to find a way to write after Joyce. Then I consider his biography in more detail, including his relationship with Joyce, his work with the French Resistance, and his turn to both minimalism and the French language. Finally, I read Waiting for Godot itself, his most famous play, as a drama of “posts”: post-Christian, post-Romantic, post-political, post-theatrical, post-modernist, and post-life, with nonetheless a minimal ethic counseling us against total despair. Don’t miss my shocking theory about the true identities of Pozzo and Lucky. This episode is free to all. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription, especially if you want access to our summer reading of Ulysses and Middlemarch. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: W.H. Auden

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: W.H. Auden

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is about the life and work of W. H. Auden. I consider the poet’s reputation as the third of the three great modern poets in British literature after Yeats and Eliot. I read from a Virginia Woolf essay introducing Auden’s ’30s generation of young, privileged, radical writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and others. I discuss Auden’s biography, with a focus on his travels, both geographical and ideological, especially his journey with Isherwood to the U.S. and his journey from Marxism to Christianity. Then I turn to three themes of his anti- and incipiently post-modernist poetry, a poetry oriented toward “the mortal world” as against the occultism and obscurantism of high modernists like Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Woolf: the reality of love in “Lullaby” and “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the reality of politics in “Spain 1937,” “September 1, 1939,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and the reality of poetry itself in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “The Shield of Achilles.” I quote Orwell on Auden’s political dereliction in the Marxist ’30s and elaborate on Auden’s revisions of his own past work. I discuss his changing analysis of the causes of war (is “what all schoolchildren learn” adequate knowledge? must we love one another or die?) and how his view in the Yeats elegy that “poetry makes nothing happen” separates poetry from politics. Above all I consider his attitude toward love. I conclude with his rebuke to the modern and ancient worlds for their totalizing brutality, a brutality his poetry’s orientation toward the real may ameliorate, in the anti-Homeric, anti-Romantic ekphrastic poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Virginia Woolf

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Virginia Woolf

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is about the life and work of Virginia Woolf, with a focus on her novel To the Lighthouse. I open by considering Woolf as more poet than novelist. Then I discuss Woolf’s biography, especially her distinguished lineage, her participation in the Bloomsbury Group, and what she called her “madness.” I further explore her literary life as critic and novelist, her shift from mainstream publishing to independent publishing, and her move from realist fiction to various kinds of experimental fiction. I also examine her feminist politics and deepening radicalism, and her modernist and feminist manifestoes. I explain the stream-of-consciousness technique governing To the Lighthouse. Borrowing from my own academic advisor, I then read the novel as a portrayal of the 20th-century artistic woman usurping and extending the function of the 19th-century domestic woman in her affective literacy, her social sympathy, and her ability to bring people together. Borrowing from Erich Auerbach, I inquire whether this apotheosis of the modern artist portends a humanist utopia or an elitist dystopia. Finally, countering those socio-political readings, and borrowing from James Wood, I interpret art in To the Lighthouse as a confrontation with and a vision of the raw void or vortex at the heart of life—a confrontation and a vision even unto death, whether the death of the individual artist or of the social order at large. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: D.H. Lawrence

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: D.H. Lawrence

    · Grand Podcast Abyss

    Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is free to all in its entirety as a preview of what paid subscribers enjoy every week: it’s about the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. I discuss Lawrence’s life as the first English working-class novelist, his travails as his sexually explicit and politically rebellious work met with controversy and censorship, and his flight from England across the world from Italy to Australia to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s famous artist colony in New Mexico. I consider his difficult social, political, and metaphysical thought, which some have called “fascist,” and his once celebrated and then despised theories of love and sexuality, with comments on Frances Wilson’s recent Lawrence biography, Burning Man, and on Lawrence’s own most controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent. I then turn to an appreciation of Lawrence’s stylistic move from realism to modernism and his innovative approach to fictional characterization in early stories like “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Prussian Officer.” I consider his ambitious middle-period manifestoes for modernist fiction and for free verse in the essays “Why the Novel Matters” and “The Poetry of the Present.” Finally, I read Lawrence’s later poems “Snake” and “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” as they transvalue the traditional values of the Christian and Enlightened west and become occult and Orphic free-verse hymns to a new interrelation of soul and body, humanity and nature, heaven and hell. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: William Butler Yeats

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: William Butler Yeats

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is about the life and work of W. B. Yeats. I discuss Yeats’s biography as his art goes from late Romanticism to a high modernism amid the turbulence of Ireland’s liberation and under the influence of spiritual forces. Yeats’s controversial political views and his occult philosophies are considered. Then we turn to some of the finest English-language poems of the 20th century. We investigate the pastoral Romantic nationalism of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the epic-tragic anti-colonialism of the ambivalently elegiac “Easter, 1916,” the mythic and occult significance of the apocalyptic “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” the ambiguous spiritual escapism of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the Nietzschean aristocratic tragic heroism of “Lapis Lazuli,” and the earthy farewell to poetry and spiritual transcendence of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Joseph Conrad

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Joseph Conrad

    · Grand Podcast Abyss
    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 lecture is about the life and work of Joseph Conrad, with a focus on his novel of anarchism and terrorism, The Secret Agent. I first discuss Conrad’s biography: his harrowing childhood as the son of a Polish nationalist under Russian occupation; his seafaring years in the merchant marine amid the industrial revolution in sailing from wind to steam power; and his gradual rise to prominence as a major novelist in British and world letters. I make several remarks about Heart of Darkness, his most famous work, and about his sometimes controversial reception by writers, critics, and biographers like Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Maya Jasanoff, while also emphasizing his enormous influence on British, American, and postcolonial literature. I then turn to Conrad’s own modernist manifesto of l’art pour l’art as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conrad’s thriller The Secret Agent in the history of anarchism and terrorism in the late 19th century. Finally, I offer a reading of this novel stressing its satire on radicalism and radical chic, its formal assault on the standardization of time and the fetishism of science, its depiction of murderous freedom and redemptive empire, its atopic portrait of the placeless and denationalized modern city, and its dueling visions of the nihilist terrorist and the compassionate idiot as exemplary modern artists. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

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