Writing
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The History of Literature #120 – The Astonishing Emily Dickinson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:59 — 49.0MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | More Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) might be the most enigmatic poet who ever lived. Her innovative use of meter and punctuation – and above all the liveliness of her ideas, as she crashes together abstract thoughts and concrete images – astonished her nineteenth-century readers and have… Continue reading
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History of Literature #119 – The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:18:39 — 54.3MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | More Very few works of art have had the cultural and literary impact of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. An immediate success upon its publication in 1951, and popular with teenagers (and adults) ever since, the book has sold over 65 million copies… Continue reading
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History of Literature #118 – Oscar’s Ghost – The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (with Laura Lee)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:09 — 38.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | More In Episode 87, we looked at the trials of Oscar Wilde and how they led to his eventual imprisonment and tragically early death. This episode picks up where that one left off, as the incarcerated Wilde writes a manuscript, De Profundis, that eventually leads to… Continue reading
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History of Literature #117 – Machiavelli and The Prince
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:54 — 44.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) went from being a little-known functionary to one of the most famous and controversial political theorists of all time. His masterpiece Il Principe (or in English, The Prince) has been read, studied, and argued about for 500 years. “A guidebook for statesmen,” said Benito Mussolini.… Continue reading
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History of Literature #116 – Ghost Stories!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:54 — 50.3MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More It’s the Halloween Episode! After some false starts (thanks, Gar!), Jacke settles in to discuss some ghost stories, including a few old chestnuts, a little Toni Morrison, a little Henry James, and a LOT of real-life phenomena. Along the way, he discusses how ghost stories… Continue reading
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History of Literature #115 – The Genius of Alice Munro
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:04 — 63.5MB) | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS | More She was born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, in a small town called Wingham Ontario, the daughter of a mink farmer and a schoolteacher. Eighty years later, Alice Munro was the first Canadian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mike and… 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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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
Jacke Wilson 