William Faulkner is acknowledge to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His scintillating writing, masterful plots, mesmerizing characters, and shocking perspective make him the other great pioneer of Southern Gothic (along with Flannery O'Connor) and one of the Southern Renaissance's most intriguing voices. In this episode, Drs. Masson and Friesen focus in on one of his best known short stories, "A Rose for Emily," exploring its curious mix of the macabre and the illuminating.
Today we discuss a flagship work of Post-Modernism, Waiting for Godot. This is one of the seminal works which signals the way forward for culture and its art in the Post-Modernist era (1945-2001). We explore the evolution of our current angst, nihilism and vast loneliness. It is easy to dismiss this play as ridiculous, which it is, but that does not keep it from being incredibly important to where we find ourselves today.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is the greatest author of the the twentieth century. At least he is by popular acclaim. In the eyes of the critics and the literary establishment, he has been virtually ignored. In this episode we open what could be a lengthy discussion of this author, seeking to explain the utter divergence of opinion on Tolkien.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His reputation, however, only really advanced in the light of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Kafka was Jewish. Like Orwell, Kafka's name has become synonymous with the type of world he portrays, in Kafka's case a world operating under an absurd series of conditions in which human freedom is rendered meaningless, and in which human nature becomes utterly dehumanized.
Today's episode focuses on Flannery O'Connor (1925–64), an American writer famed for her 'southern Gothic' style. We will read O'Connor as a Christian realist who portrays the depravity of the human condition with unusual acuity, set as it is in sharp relief against the backdrop of Southern gentility.
In today's episode of Paideia Today, we look at the famed British novelist George Orwell (1903-50), whose work is so harrowing the adjective Orwellian has come to describe the peculiarly modern form of totalitarian technocracy.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. We spend the majority of the episode looking at Yeats' most famous poem and observe the way it reflects the worldview of his era.
W.H. Auden (1907 –1973) is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Some regard him as a lesser poet to Yeats and Eliot - we discuss that here - but he was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects. Unlike Eliot, who migrated from America to Britain, Auden did the opposite. His reputation grew after his death as well, which is usually a good sign of merit.
T.S. Eliot has been embraced as a great poet on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in the United States, Eliot emigrated to England and remained there. He became the key figure of the Modernist movement. We discuss Eliot's poetry as well as the movement itself in this week's episode.
Joseph Conrad is an extraordinary figure, not least because he wrote his novels in his second language. His novella Heart of Darkness is justly famous for its depiction of the evil of the human heart in the context of the 'scramble for Africa'. It has been variously described as a 'colonialist' and a 'postcolonialist' novella.
While there is no dispute that the expansion of the European powers into Africa is its contemporary context, and there is a critique of colonialism in the text, we dismiss it as reductive to see Conrad's work solely in that light.
Episode 2 of Season four again sets the foundation for the Modernist movement, looking at the two superb poetic craftsman, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman. What is noteworthy about the two, besides their aesthetic excellence, is the way they capture a fin-de-siecle cultural despair and express its pervasive sense of alienation. While the First World War will devastate much of Western Christendom, it is important to note that the dissonant notes to the leitmotif of social progress are already being sounded by these two important poets.
Season 4 of Paideia Today begins with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. Wilde initiates literary modernism, which in turn sows the seeds of a sort of postmodernism rarely discussed by those tracing the history of ideas. It is vital, however, because it connects the pursuit of a rather ugly 'aesthetics' movement with an assault on goodness and truth. Goodness, beauty, and truth have been seen to be connected since the ancient world. But in literary modernism, we see the doctrinal severance of beauty from notions of morality and truth. Horaces's dictum for the poet was 'to teach and to delight'. Wilde's pursuit of delight, however, is presented in an amoral fashion (in keeping with the fashionable agnosticism of his era). It is no accident that the twentieth century was marked by what C.S. Lewis described as 'the Abolition of Man', but also by a total departure from the educational aims of the world prior to then, in pursuit of a transhumanist and often posthumanist ideal.
For the conclusion of season 3 of Paideia Today we look at the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, engages with the modern alienation from life that progressive ideology and commitment to material advances. Rather than one of Tolstoy's magisterial novels like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, we look at his brilliant novella, which addresses themes concerning wisdom and virtue, themes often very much ignored in fiction thereafter.
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment catalogues the life of a young political idealist who commits two murders to fulfill his ambition. It is an exceptionally subtle and complex narrative, which not only leans on elements of Dostoevsky's own biography, but situates them within a Christian framework of guilt and redemption.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and until recently was one of the most popular British poets. But he has been seriously neglected in recent years. In this episode of Paideia Today, we discuss his most important poem.
Today's episode of Paideia Today looks at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This fascinating novel represents an amalgamation of various strands of the novel tradition, but arguably begins a new one, that of science fiction. In the process, Shelley also begins a prescient critique of the transhumanist impulse of the modern scientist, or modern Prometheus, as she calls him, and his abandonment of the ethics of love in pursuit of allegedly humanitarian progress.
Jane Austen is without doubt one of the finest prose stylists and keenest observers of human nature. We discuss Austen as a novelist in the light of that eighteenth century genre, noting that her clear satire is what marks her as a great moral writer. The focus of our discussion is her splendid novel Pride and Prejudice, a masterpiece in tracing the lineaments of fallen humanity, and the proud flaws of even its most admirable characters, here represented in the characters of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with giving the definitive take on the imagination, the faculty all the Romantics claim marks their distinctive poetic experiment. But is Coleridge's definition actually more a critique of Romantic poetics than an expression of it? This episode begins by discussing his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but ranges to discuss a broad array of topics.
William Wordsworth is the poet most strongly identified with a literary movement we call Romantic. Today's episode discusses many of the complex features of that movement while also engaging with some of the work by the great poet.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is a colossal figure who bestrides the age lying between the age of Pope and the Romantics. In acknowledgement of his extraordinary erudition, he is often referred to as Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. He is an important figure not only for conservative thinking, but the English moral sense tradition. On today's episode, we discuss this much-overlooked but enormously important literary figure.
