Episodes

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

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

    · 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, 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:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

    · 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, 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:

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  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Robert Frost

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Robert Frost

    · 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 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
  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry James's The Bostonians

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Henry James's The Bostonians

    · 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, 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:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Emily Dickinson

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Emily Dickinson

    · 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, 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 BrontĂ«, 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:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Walt Whitman

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Walt Whitman

    · 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, 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:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (3)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (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 episode is the third in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; the first 25 minutes are available to all, the total two hours and 15 minutes reserved for paid subscribers. Here we discuss Shakespeare’s overwhelming influence on Melville, especially the final third of this novel. We also read Melville’s manifesto, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which argues that an American Shakespeare will succeed the bard because liberated by the Declaration of Independence and “republican progressivism” to tell the truth. We also consider Melville’s homoerotic paean to Hawthorne and his praise of the writer’s “power of blackness.” This leads back to Moby-Dick: to its homoerotic phallicism and its transvaluation of racial values. With help from D. H. Lawrence and Toni Morrison, we discover in Melville a partisan of black revolution. We also consider Ishmael’s pluralism, pragmatism, and perspectivism as a narrator; another critical passage, this time from James Wood, finds atheism and polytheism in Melville’s flood of metaphor. We dwell on the novel’s epic and tragic sublimity, its quarrel with Emerson over self-reliance, and its conflict between individual and community. With Charles Olson, we examine its occult subtext, as Ahab takes the left-hand and Ishmael the right-hand path. Finally, we read the ending—and, following a suggestion from a commenter, test the idea that Ishmael and Ahab are doubles, the myriad-minded narrator what the monomaniacal captain would be if he’d survived his tragic apotheosis. 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 Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, 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:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (2)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (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 episode—over two hours for paid subscribers, with a 15-minute preview for free subscribers—is the second in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First we discuss the unity and disunity of Moby-Dick—whether or not the novel is, as Melville said, a “botch”—with remarks on its relation to 20th-century critical trends like New Criticism and deconstruction. I offer my own view as a novelist about the question of whether or not works of literature should seek coherence or contradiction, unity or aporia. Then we consider the strange identity of the novel’s three main personae—Ishmael, Ahab, and the titular whale itself—and the novel’s vein of Orientalism centered on the figure of Fedallah. Next we explore the mood of pessimism and misanthropy that marks the novel’s middle third, abrading the revolutionary cosmopolitan optimism of the first third, and investigate the themes of fate, free will, and chance. For the rest of the episode, I examine Ishmael’s cetology chapters and their metafictional relation to realism and allegory, their theological implications, and their anti-philosophical bias. I further detect unexpected elements of the sentimental and the feminine—not to mention the ecological—in this otherwise radical, masculinist, and gnostic epic. Finally, I note the novel’s ambitious civilizational syncretism, uniting Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, and Christian myth. 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 the finale of 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 below the paywall:

  • THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1)

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (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 episode, free in its entirety, is the first in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First I make some general remarks about Moby-Dick, its multiple genres and influences (the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton), and how difficult it is to read relative to other “difficult” classics. Then I discuss Melville’s biography, with an emphasis on “the tormented psychology of the decaying patrician,” to quote a critic, as well as his experiences with non-western cultures and his struggles with family and authority, and I make some remarks on his other works. I give a primer on the Biblical precedents for Moby-Dick’s three central characters—Ishmael, Ahab, and Leviathan—and summarize Melville’s radical redaction of Judeo-Christian tradition: his siding against the chosen and with the outcast and his speculations on a covenant with nature. I note the book’s multiple modes and traditions: epic, romance, satire, anatomy, tragedy, and realism. I then summarize the first third of Moby-Dick and consider its “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and opening paragraph. I survey themes of wonder and sublimity, the escape from domesticity and femininity, cosmopolitanism and queer desire, democracy and kingship, the modernization of tragedy, relativism vs. absolutism, and Melville’s proto-modernist critique both of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Finally, I try to solve the puzzle of the novel’s most esoteric passage: what is “the old State-secret”? 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 parts two and three on 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 below the paywall:



    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: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

    · 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 fourth in a 16-week sequence on American literature, focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of American radicalism, American occultism, and American aestheticism, The Blithedale Romance. First, I make general remarks about Hawthorne, especially The Scarlet Letter, and his role in high-school and college curricula, with a recommendation that The Blithedale Romance might be the young reader’s best introduction to the author considering its more immediate first-person narration and its perennially controversial themes. I also explore Hawthorne’s influences and affinities, ranging from Henry James and William Faulkner to Franz Kafka and David Lynch. Then I recount Hawthorne’s biography, review Henry James’s famous comments on the rudimentary American civilization he confronted, and evaluate his consequent insistence that he wrote “romances” rather than “novels.” Then I read D. H. Lawrence’s maliciously satirical plot summary of The Blithedale Romance before surveying themes of Puritanism, radicalism, feminism, conservatism, occultism, and aestheticism in the novel. Finally, with Irving Howe, I consider the question of whether or not this novel is an artistic failure. 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 below the paywall:

  • 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:

  • 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:

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