Afleveringen
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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 Joyceâs Ulysses. First, we hear James Joyceâs voice, reading from the âAeolusâ episode. Then I consider the following: the formal anti-realist turn represented by the use of interpolated headlines in âAeolus,â plus the chapterâs 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 âLestrygoniansâ and the information it relays about Bloomâs life and times, especially in one of the novelâs most moving, passionate, and beautiful passages; and âScylla and Charabdys,â with its return to philosophical themes (Plato vs. Aristotle; idealism vs. empiricism; Romanticism vs. realism) and Stephenâs strikingly proto-postmodern theory of Shakespearean authorship, what I call âDark Stratfordianism.â (You wonât 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:
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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 Joyceâs 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 novelâs possibly almost occult use of Homeric correspondences with help from Stuart Gilbertâs James Joyceâs Ulysses: A Study. Then I investigate âCalypso,â 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 âThe Lotus Eaters,â I focus on Bloomâs 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 âHades,â 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 Danteâs Inferno and Defoeâs Robinson Crusoe. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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 Joyceâs Ulysses: âTelemachus,â âNestor,â and âProteus.â I first make some general remarks about the novelâs context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the bookâs notorious difficulty. I summarize the first three chapters for first-time readers and then closely examine select passages. Themes raised in âTelemachusâ include Stephenâs 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 âNestorâ I dwell on history as nightmare and the affinity Stephen perceives between the Irish and the Jews as a usurped and oppressed people. In âProteus,â with its much more thoroughgoing stream-of-consciousness narration, I consider the war in Stephenâs mind between Plato and Aristotle, idealism and empiricism, Romanticism and realism, and their synthesis in the very form of this novel; I further investigate Stephenâs relationsâfilial, sexual, and amicableâwith men and women; and I pause to remark on the unparalleled beauty and significance of Joyceâs language. This episode is the only free one in the Joyce sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!âand please offer a paid subscription so you donât miss the rest of this summerâs 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:
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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 Joyceâs first novel, the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I discuss the novelâs 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 Joyceâs stand-in Stephen Dedalus, from the babytalk of his childhood to the philosophizing of his early adulthood. I explain Joyceâs 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 novelâs title. Then I journey through the novelâs plot and structure, elaborating on themes, styles, and motifs, with attention to the narrativeâs 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 Joyceâs 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 commentâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Joyceâs first major work, the short story collection Dubliners. I briefly discuss Joyceâs life. Then I explain the censorship troubles Dubliners faced, the influential theory of the âepiphanyâ 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 âThe Sistersâ to the universal vision of âThe Dead,â with comments on Joyceâs religion, politics, and sexuality. Next week, we will turn to Joyceâs 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 commentâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Beckettâs 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 âpostsâ: post-Christian, post-Romantic, post-political, post-theatrical, post-modernist, and post-life, with nonetheless a minimal ethic counseling us against total despair. Donât 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, subscribeâand please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:
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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 poetâs 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 Audenâs â30s generation of young, privileged, radical writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and others. I discuss Audenâs 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 âthe mortal worldâ as against the occultism and obscurantism of high modernists like Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Woolf: the reality of love in âLullabyâ and âAs I Walked Out One Evening,â the reality of politics in âSpain 1937,â âSeptember 1, 1939,â and âThe Unknown Citizen,â and the reality of poetry itself in âIn Memory of W. B. Yeatsâ and âThe Shield of Achilles.â I quote Orwell on Audenâs political dereliction in the Marxist â30s and elaborate on Audenâs revisions of his own past work. I discuss his changing analysis of the causes of war (is âwhat all schoolchildren learnâ adequate knowledge? must we love one another or die?) and how his view in the Yeats elegy that âpoetry makes nothing happenâ 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 poetryâs orientation toward the real may ameliorate, in the anti-Homeric, anti-Romantic ekphrastic poem, âThe Shield of Achilles.â Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Woolfâs biography, especially her distinguished lineage, her participation in the Bloomsbury Group, and what she called her âmadness.â 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 lifeâa 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, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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: itâs about the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. I discuss Lawrenceâs 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 Luhanâs famous artist colony in New Mexico. I consider his difficult social, political, and metaphysical thought, which some have called âfascist,â and his once celebrated and then despised theories of love and sexuality, with comments on Frances Wilsonâs recent Lawrence biography, Burning Man, and on Lawrenceâs own most controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent. I then turn to an appreciation of Lawrenceâs stylistic move from realism to modernism and his innovative approach to fictional characterization in early stories like âOdour of Chrysanthemumsâ and âThe Prussian Officer.â I consider his ambitious middle-period manifestoes for modernist fiction and for free verse in the essays âWhy the Novel Mattersâ and âThe Poetry of the Present.â Finally, I read Lawrenceâs later poems âSnakeâ and âMedlars and Sorb-Applesâ 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, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:
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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 Yeatsâs biography as his art goes from late Romanticism to a high modernism amid the turbulence of Irelandâs liberation and under the influence of spiritual forces. Yeatsâs 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 âThe Lake Isle of Innisfree,â the epic-tragic anti-colonialism of the ambivalently elegiac âEaster, 1916,â the mythic and occult significance of the apocalyptic âThe Second Comingâ and âLeda and the Swan,â the ambiguous spiritual escapism of âSailing to Byzantium,â the Nietzschean aristocratic tragic heroism of âLapis Lazuli,â and the earthy farewell to poetry and spiritual transcendence of âThe Circus Animalsâ Desertion.â Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Conradâs 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 Conradâs own modernist manifesto of lâart pour lâart as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conradâs 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, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Oscar Wilde. I begin with a recitation of Wildeâs dramatic life story with its consciously shaped tragic arcâthe tragedy he lived but could not writeâwith passing remarks on most of his major work and on his Aestheticist philosophy. I elaborate on his revolutionary literary theory, which sunders art from mimesis and criticism itself from truth: a postmodernism of the fin de siĂšcle. Then, in the light of this theory, I offer a formalist interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest. I reads the comedy as a device for producing Wildean epigrams, among them epigrams that mock Victorian sententiousness, epigrams that express Wildeâs own Aestheticism, and, finally, epigrams of pure contentless wit anticipating the linguistic experiments of high modernism and postmodernism in writers like Stein, Joyce, Stevens, and Ashbery. I consider critics on The Importance of Being Earnest: Terence Brown on the play as the utopia of the dandy; Camille Paglia on the play as âreactionary prose poem,â the first piece of modernist fascist art; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the play as celebration of the âavunculate,â those aunts and uncles who model for the budding queer child the pleasure and promise of non-normative sexualities. Finally, in anticipation of the next episode on Conrad and early modernist fiction, I emphasize the playâs withering attitude toward the Victorian novel as the antitype to its Aestheticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
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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 George Bernard Shaw. We begin by discussing Shawâs 1930s position that unproductive members of complex societies should be culled and then trace this concept through its hints and intimations in the Ibsenite New Woman fin-de-siĂšcle realist drama of Mrs. Warrenâs Profession before pursuing it into the cosmic vistas of his later work. We also note Shawâs position that Wagnerian opera has made âthe drama of feelingâ obsolete, leaving only âthe drama of thoughtâ as the legitimate form of non-musical theater, as well as his view that art must be propaganda for a high spiritual and social vision and his consequent deprecation of the âentertainersâ Shakespeare and Dickens below âartist-philosophersâ like Blake and Tolstoy. The relation of these ideas to contemporary conspiracy theories, to socialism, fascism, and feminism, and to my own political views is also carefully considered. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
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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 lives and works of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is free in its entirety to all; if you like it, please offer a paid subscription to enjoy past and future episodes. I discuss the Rossetti family, including Gabriele Rossettiâs conspiracy theory of literary history, and the Rossetti womenâs devout Anglo-Catholicism; the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman; Christina Rossettiâs sonnets of female experience and limitation; and her âGoblin Market,â with its Christian allegory, its anti-capitalist critique, and its sapphic subtext, not to mention its metrical originality and its bold use of metaphor and metonymy. I further discuss Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs tutelage at Oxford under Walter Pater; Paterâs theory of art for artâs sake, his lyrical prose style, and their influence on modernism; Hopkinsâs conversion to Catholicism and his entrance to the priesthood; his poetics, including his theories of âinscapeâ and âinstressâ and his use of âsprung rhythmâ; his poetryâs performance of its meaning and its spiritual implication; his elegy for the working man and its homoerotic subtext; his nostalgia for medieval Oxford; and his âterrible sonnetsâ and their battle against despair. Above all, I discuss two poetsâ struggle to conjugate their religious devotion, their literary originality, and their possibly proscribed desire on the threshold between the Victorian and the modern. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
Erratum: I think I casually said Walter Pater converted to Catholicism, which isnât true. He was attracted to the ritualism and aesthetics of the church, but, like his hero Marius, he did not quite make the leap before his unexpected death at the age of 54.
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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 Charles Dickens and his condition-of-England novel Hard Times. I discuss Dickensâs successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwardly mobile origin, his literary celebrity, and his personal scandals; Dickensâs afterlife as an influence and counter-influence on the development of both the elite and the popular novel; the importance to Dickens (and to the whole of modern literature and politics) of the Victorian Sage Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyleâs influence on the emergence of both socialism and fascism; the Victorian problems of utilitarianism, individualism, and revolutionism Dickens identifies in Hard Times; the solutions to these problems the novel proposes, including reformism, sentimentality, domesticity, Christianity, and fancy; and the novelâs utopian horizon, as against Carlylean fascism-socialism or sentimental reformism, located in the potentially universal dĂ©classĂ© space of the circus and theater whose form the dramatic Dickensian novel imitates. The first 25 minutes, which include a scorching denunciation of didacticism in the art museum, are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 lives and works of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I discuss Robert Browningâs theory that poetry historically cycles between objective and subjective styles; his use of the dramatic monologue as an adaptation of poetry for the age of the realist novel, especially as the novel has been theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin; the critique of aristocracy and patriarchy in his textbook dramatic monologue, âMy Last Duchessâ; his novelistic and psychological revision of the Romantic visionary poem in ââChilde Roland to the Dark Tower Cameââ; his historicization of realism as the product of burgeoning Renaissance capitalism and individualism in âFra Lippo Lippi,â and his religious defense, in the same poem, of realism as an artistic disclosure of the goodness of Godâs creation; and, finally, his attack on the pursuit of perfection, as opposed to imperfect striving, in âAndrea del Sarto.â I further discuss the early sentimental activist poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and its reliance on the idea of separate spheres for men and women, and her later novel-in-verse, Aurora Leigh, with its satire of the limitations imposed on female intellect, its defense of poetry against progressive detractors, and its theory that poetry should become an epic of the present or realist novel in verse. The first 10 minutes are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I discuss the Victorian period in general, especially considered as an object of study and as a cultural moment between Romanticism and modernism; the life of Tennyson, including his painful childhood, his time in the secret society of Cambridge Apostles, his relationship with his beloved Arthur Hallam, his struggle with the legacy of Romanticism, his emergence as the voice of his nation, and his afterlife as modernist whipping boy; the short-lived Hallamâs claim that Tennyson carried on the legacy of Keats and Shelley as author of a sensuous but marginal poetry; Tennysonâs âLady of Shalottâ and its feminized medievalist aestheticism in relation both to the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde of poets and painters and the thundering âviolent Toryâ art criticism of John Ruskin; Tennysonâs âLocksley Hallâ and âUlyssesâ as attempt to create a masculinist, futurist heroism to escape Romantic marginality; and Tennysonâs In Memoriam as an expression of Victorian anxieties over science and religion and an expression of Victorian faith in order beyond chaos. The first 20 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the restâand please enjoy! The slideshow for the lecture is below the paywall.
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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 Jane Austen and her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. I discuss Austenâs biography; her place in the history of the novel; her posthumous reception by skeptical Romantics, hostile radicals, appreciative humanists, and realist and modernist novelists; the complex class system underlying her fiction; her characteristic irony and use of free indirect style; her hostility to âmimetic desireâ; her creation of a perfectly flawed heroine in need of Bildung; her vision of class mobility and class reconciliation through the literal wedding of middle-class female emotional literacy to aristocratic male judgment and power; her valuation of nature and art; her ambition for the novel to play a leading ethical role in society; and the way her novels make moral self-knowledge newly available to modern audiences. The first 15 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the rest. Please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall.
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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 Lord Byron. It is free to all readers and listeners; if you enjoy it, please consider a paid subscription. Contents: Byronâs brief and dramatic life; the long afterlife of his âByronic heroâ in high literature, popular culture, and radical philosophy; Romantic gnosticism, idealism, incest, and gender in Byronâs dramatic poem Manfred; Byronâs epic Don Juan as anti-Romantic manifesto; and the decomposition of the epic into other modes and genres under the pressure of modern individualism and atomization. Please enjoyâand please subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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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 John Keats. Contents: Keatsâs link with Shelley as poets-gone-too-soon, as Romantic classicists, and as lyricists of high polish; Keatsâs tragically brief life and visceral life expeâŠ
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