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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, Mallarmé, and Lovecraft, I emphasize Poe’s extraordinary influence on world literature across several different...

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...

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...

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...

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”);...

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…

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 fourth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes four through six of Joyce’s Ulysses. I begin by characterizing the lower-middle-class cultural milieu of the Bloom sections of the novel with its focus on popular and middlebrow as...

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 third in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is the first three chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” and “Proteus.” I first make some general remarks about the novel’s context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the book’s notorious difficulty. I...

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 second in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is Joyce’s first novel, the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I discuss the novel’s history, from its first version, Stephen Hero, a 1000-page omnisciently narrated realist...

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 first in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. I begin with some advice for reading Ulysses, which we will begin in two weeks. Mainly, however, this episode covers Joyce’s first major work, the short story collection Dubliners. I briefly discuss Joyce’s...