Episoder
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, concerns Rainer Maria Rilkeâs Duino Elegies. We consider Rilkeâs biography and progress as a poet toward modernism and the poetics of the New Age exemplified by Rilkeâs agentic idealism; then we turn to angels, mothers, lovers, puppets, acrobats, blossoms, concepts, animals, poets, and stars in the Duino Elegies. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. We discuss Proustâs biography, translation, and reception; his conceptions of memory, art, culture, and nature; his study of jealousy and the ethics of apprehending personality; his pathology model of love; and his aesthetic Platonism. The first 10 minutes are free. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Mangler du episoder?
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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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the eighth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Anton Chekhovâs The Cherry Orchard and Henrik Ibsenâs Hedda Gabler, two revolutionary works of the modern theater, whose realism, I argue, assembles the properties of social drama only to clear them away in preparation for the void of modernism. The first 10 minutes are free. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns three of Tolstoyâs short novels: The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad. I discuss many things but mostly my latter-day aversion to the Count. First 10 minutes are free, the following two-plus hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: we return to drama with Chekhov and Ibsen. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the second half of Fyodor Dostoevskyâs Crime and Punishment. We focus on the novelâs more and more âDostoevskeanâ tone with scenes of collective hysteria, as well as its developing Christian didacticism. We consider Nabokovâs criticism in more detail: is Raskolnikovâs motive coherent? We explore Dostoevskyâs satire of the materialist left and of the figure of Romantic evil. We dream Raskolnikovâs dream. First 10 minutes are free, the following two hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: Tolstoy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the sixth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the first half of Fyodor Dostoevskyâs Crime and Punishment. We consider the novelâs context in Russian religious, cultural, and literary history alongside the authorâs biography; then we investigate its dialogic, interior, and oneiric literary techniques, spanning sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and its themes, including alcoholism, sexual exploitation, the nature of crime, the instability of the self, and the deficiencies of modern western worldviews like materialism, socialism, and the worship of great men. The first 27 minutes, including an argument against the received idea that Dostoevsky is a writer for adolescents, are free; a paid subscription will grant you access to the restâand to The Invisible Collegeâs ever-expanding archive of episodes on the classics. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the fourth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Gustave Flaubertâs Madame Bovary. I discuss Flaubertâs position at the intersection of Romanticism, realism, and modernism; his hatred of the bourgeoisie; his nihilism and irony; his war against clichĂ© and search for le mot juste; his skepticism about language and progress; the novelâs obscenity trial and lack of a moral viewpoint; its several famous set pieces; and much more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the third in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Heinrich von Kleistâs novella Michael Kohlhaas and ancillary texts including the classic essay âOn the Marionette Theater.â I explain the nihilism that befell Kleist after his reading of Kant, his anticipation of modernist irony in figures like Kafka, his Romantic conflict with Goetheâs classicism, and his troubled life. Then I show Michael Kohlhaas to concern the irony of a quest for justice that produces injustice and the consequence of a solipsistic post-Kantian interpretation of the Reformation as licensing absolute individuality. Along the way, I interpret later novels influenced by Michael Kohlhaas, like Doctorowâs Ragtime and Coetzeeâs Life & Times of Michael K, I analyze minute but consequential differences in two translations of the text, and more. I conclude with Kleistâs essay on the marionette theater and its suggestion that we will use art to reattain our prelapsarian innocence, having observed the vanity of thought disclosed by modern philosophy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the second in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part II by Goethe. I unravel crucial themes in this famously difficult experimental dramatic poem: the philosophy of money, the conflict between youth and age, the creation of artificial life, the conflict between Classic and Gothic cultures, the end of Romanticism, the potential and costs of technological progress, the multifarious representation of masculine and feminine, and the question of salvation. Plus, critical commentary from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, Harold Bloom, and Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle, who designates Faust, Part II not an example of Classical, Enlightenment, or Romantic literature but rather a quintessentially postmodern work. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the first in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part I by Goethe. I explain Goetheâs place in world literature among the most major writers, his rich historical context in the moment of German Romanticism and Weimar Classicism, and his extraordinarily various achievements in almost every field of literature as well as in science and thought. Then I recount the history of the Faust legend and explain Goetheâs innovations on the myth. Finally, we consider the many themes and modes of the first part of the dramatic poem: the mission of the poet, the value of negation, the meaning of magic, the truth of nature, everything from neo-Shakespearean tragedy to bourgeois romance to proto-surrealist phantasmagoria, not to mention the mystery of salvation. Next week: Faust, Part II. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, free in its entirety, concerns two ancient treatises on literature: Aristotleâs Poetics and Longinusâs On the Sublime. First, I rehearse the life and overall philosophical contribution of Aristotle; then I explore his theory of tragedyâincluding immensely influential concepts like mimesis, the tragic flaw, and the catharsis of pity and terrorâand discuss their relation to his philosophy in general and as a riposte to Platoâs censoriousness; finally, I explain why he judged tragedy a better genre than epic and poetry a more philosophical form of writing than history. Second, I turn to Longinus and his theory of the sublime in literature, his focus on emotion and ecstasy over structure, his rhapsodic close reading of Sappho, his mischievous praise for Platoâs madness, his defense of metaphor, his love for the flawed work of genius over the merely correct work of diligent mediocrity, his view that genius represents the inherent infinitude of humanity, and his discussion of literary decline in relation to war, democracy, and the love of money. Finally, I consider these two treatises as the origin points for divergent forms of modern literary aesthetics: neoclassicist and formalist for Aristotle, Romantic and subjectivist for Longinus. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here:
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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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, concerns Platoâs philosophical dialogues Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus. We consider the roots of Greek philosophy and the character of Socrates; Platoâs war on poetry and sophistry, his philosophy of sex and love, his theory of forms, his totalitarian politics, and his case against media; plus, the real reason Socrates was executed and Jacques Derridaâs deconstructive reading of Plato as writer. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 12 minutes is free, concerns Aristophanesâs comedy Lysistrata and Euripidesâs tragedies Medea and Bacchae. We consider the Old Comedy and the New and their divergent legacies, as well as the conservative subversions of Aristophanic satire. Then we turn to Euripidesâs controversial innovations in the art of tragedy (deprecated by Aristophanes, among others) and his association with radical currents in Athenian life. Added commentary by Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anne Carson, and Camille Paglia. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes is free, concerns Sophoclesâs Theban plays. I discuss Sophoclesâs biography and his place among the tragedians in 5th-century Athens; I consider Antigone as clash of values and ambivalent portrayal of perversity and extremism, with reference to Hegel; I read Oedipus the King as a counter-enlightenment statement vindicating the primacy of fate over knowledge, with reference to Freud; and I interpret Oedipus at Colonus as a mystery rite in defense of mystery, and a pre- and proto-Christian portrayal of the scapegoat-become-god, with reference to Girard. Above all, I consider Sophoclesâs potential nihilism, redeemed only by the promise of joining divinity in death. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes is free, concerns Aeschylusâs tragic trilogy, The Oresteia. I discuss the limited state of our knowledge about Athenian drama and the philosophical impediments to that knowledge; questions of translation; the mythical life of Aeschylus; and the trilogy itself, a progressive dialectical narrative, half horror movie, half courtroom drama, about the regime change from impersonal youth-oriented masculine sky-god civilization from familial gerontocratic feminine earth-goddess tradition, a development I characterize as at one and the same time the nadir of misogyny and the apotheosis of feminism. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes is free, concerns Homerâs Odyssey. Topics include translation controversies, historical esoterica, and what it meansâfor everything from art to gender to social organizationâfor The Odyssey to be âthe first bourgeois novel.â Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome to 2024âs final episode of The Invisible College. It is about William Faulknerâs The Sound and the Fury. My exposition is almost as aleatory as the novel itself, but I discuss Harold Bloom and Hugh Kennerâs dissent on the novelâs reputation, the general shape of Faulknerâs career, the novelâs high modernist narrative technique, the conflict between tragic and Christian visions in the text, and more. With the help of Jean-Paul Sartre, I consider the novelâs âmetaphysic of time.â With the help of Ralph Ellison, I elaborate on its deconstruction of the racial ideology that masks humanity. With the help of AndrĂ© Bleikasten, I explore the novel as the frenzied stasis of a Grecian Urn frieze spinning around the vortex that is Faulknerâs view of the feminine. All this and more. Please enjoy! Thanks to my paid subscribers! If you are not a paid subscriber, please enjoy the free 24-minute preview, and please offer a paid subscription to hear the rest, to listen to the 2024 archive, and to join us for the next year of our âcurriculum.â I will release the 2025 syllabus on January 1; the first episode of 2025 will drop on January 17. The slideshow corresponding to this episode can be downloaded behind 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 episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. We begin with a contrast between Pound Stevens and its sequel in 20th-century literary criticism, as well as a consideration of the role played by social prejudice in Pound and Eliot on one hand and Stevens on the other. Then we discuss Stevensâs biography, a passionate inner life lived solely in poetry. We read three short early poems for what they tell us about the proper and improper uses of imagination in Stevens, and then consider his classic âSunday Morningâ for its attempt to replace religion with artistic imagination. We go on to his greater statements on the power of the poetic imagination to re-shape reality as against both totalizing religion and totalizing politics in âThe Idea of Order at Key Westâ and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!âand please offer a paid subscription so you donât miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliotâs Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded 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 episode, of which the first 16 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Ezra Pound. We begin at the ending, with the tragedy of Poundâs later-life political dereliction and incarceration. We ask not only how these events happened, but also why this most extraordinarily gifted of poets did not become his centuryâs greatest, his politics notwithstanding. Then I discuss Poundâs biography and trace his poetic and intellectual development from his early poetry through The Cantos, with a triple focus on 1. his love of Troubadour poetry and the esoteric Cathar gnostic mystical goddess cult he detected beneath it it; 2. his interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a resource for restoring English verse back to its accentual and alliterative strength after more than half a millennium of imposed iambic pentameter and rhyme; 3. and his engagement with Chinese poetry and what he thought its ideograms portended for a poetry of the image. We also discuss, with help from Hugh Kenner, his inner conflict between Romanticism-Taoism-anarchism, on the one hand, and Classicism-Confucianism-fascism, on the other. His obsession with an obscure economic theory and its influence on his politics after the calamitous Great War is also considered, as is the failure of The Cantos to find a readership even other difficult high modernist great books have. What, finally, can we all learn from Poundâs failure? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!âand please offer a paid subscription so you donât miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, with forthcoming episodes on Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliotâs Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded 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 episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns F. Scott Fitzgeraldâs The Great Gatsby. I discuss the novelâs 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 Fitzgeraldâs 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 Fitzgeraldâs 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 novelâs 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!âand please offer a paid subscription so you donât 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 Eliotâs Middlemarch, and whatever is forthcoming in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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