Arts
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History of Literature #114 – Christopher Marlowe – What Happened and What If?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:25 — 34.9MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More In 1921, T.S. Eliot wrote, “When Shakespeare borrowed from him, which was pretty often at the beginning, Shakespeare either made something inferior or something different.” He was talking about Shakespeare’s near-contemporary Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whose literary career was cut short by his murder at the… Continue reading
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History of Literature #112 – The Novelist and the Witch-Doctor – Unpacking Nabokov’s Case Against Freud (with Joshua Ferris)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:41 — 35.1MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More “I admire Freud greatly,” the novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “as a comic writer.” For Nabokov, Sigmund Freud was “the Viennese witch-doctor,” objectionable for “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of his ideas. Author Joshua Ferris (The Dinner Party, Then We Came to the End) joins Jacke for a… Continue reading
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History of Literature #111 – The Americanest American – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:45 — 42.7MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More In 1984, the literary scholar Harold Bloom had this to say about Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Emerson is the mind of our climate, the principal source of the American difference in poetry, criticism and pragmatic post-philosophy…. Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer… is the inescapable… Continue reading
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History of Literature #110 – The Heart of Darkness – Then And Now
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:36:32 — 66.6MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Jacke and Mike discuss Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, and Eleanor Coppola’s documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Then Jacke offers some thoughts on the recent events in Charlottesville, compares them with the themes in Conrad, and argues that… Continue reading
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History of Literature #107 – The Man and the Myth – Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle (with Mattias Bostrom)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:59 — 42.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Continuing our series on literary myths, we’re joined by Mattias Bostrom, author of From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon, for a conversation about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his astonishing creation, Sherlock Holmes. Would you like to… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #106 – Literature Goes to the Movies Part Two – Flops, Bombs, and Stinkeroos
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:11 — 46.4MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Ah, the sweet smell of success… and the burning stench of failure. Continuing their two part conversation on literary adaptations, Jacke and Mike choose ten of the worst book-to-movie projects of all time. How could so many people, working so hard and with such great source… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #105 – Funny Women, Crimes Against Women, George Orwell, and More (with Kathy Cooperman)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:28 — 45.9MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Kathy Cooperman, author of the new novel Crimes Against a Book Club, joins the show to discuss everything from the secret lives of book clubs to her own journey from improv to lawyering to becoming an author. She also tells Jacke about an inspiring Bette Davis… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #104 – King Lear
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:32 — 40.5MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More We all know that Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of the greatest tragedies ever written. But was it too tragic? Dr. Johnson thought it might be. Leo Tolstoy thought it was just a bad play – causing George Orwell to come valiantly to Shakespeare’s defense. Jacke Wilson takes a… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #103 – Literature Goes to the Movies
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:21 — 62.3MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More The lights dim, the audience hushes in expectation, and the light and magic begin. In some ways (the crowd, the sound) the experience of watching a movie could not be more different from reading a novel – and yet the two have some very important… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #102 – Pablo Neruda
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:36 — 46.0MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) lived an eventful life: from his youth in Chile, to the sensational reception of his book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1923), to the career in poetry that led to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (1971), to the political… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 