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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of W. H. Auden. I consider the poet’s reputation as the third of the three great modern poets in British literature after Yeats and Eliot. I read from a Virginia Woolf essay introducing Auden’s ’30s generation of young, privileged, radical writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and others. I discuss Auden’s biography, with a focus on his travels, both geographical and ideological, especially his journey with Isherwood to the U.S. and his journey from Marxism to Christianity. Then I turn to three themes of his anti- and incipiently post-modernist poetry, a poetry oriented toward “the mortal world” as against the occultism and obscurantism of high modernists like Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Woolf: the reality of love in “Lullaby” and “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the reality of politics in “Spain 1937,” “September 1, 1939,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and the reality of poetry itself in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “The Shield of Achilles.” I quote Orwell on Auden’s political dereliction in the Marxist ’30s and elaborate on Auden’s revisions of his own past work. I discuss his changing analysis of the causes of war (is “what all schoolchildren learn” adequate knowledge? must we love one another or die?) and how his view in the Yeats elegy that “poetry makes nothing happen” separates poetry from politics. Above all I consider his attitude toward love. I conclude with his rebuke to the modern and ancient worlds for their totalizing brutality, a brutality his poetry’s orientation toward the real may ameliorate, in the anti-Homeric, anti-Romantic ekphrastic poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

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 about the life and work of Virginia Woolf, with a focus on her novel To the Lighthouse. I open by considering Woolf as more poet than novelist. Then I discuss Woolf’s biography, especially her distinguished lineage, her participation in the Bloomsbury Group, and what she called her “madness.” I further explore her literary life as critic and novelist, her shift from mainstream publishing to independent publishing, and her move from realist fiction to various kinds of experimental fiction. I also examine her feminist politics and deepening radicalism, and her modernist and feminist manifestoes. I explain the stream-of-consciousness technique governing To the Lighthouse. Borrowing from my own academic advisor, I then read the novel as a portrayal of the 20th-century artistic woman usurping and extending the function of the 19th-century domestic woman in her affective literacy, her social sympathy, and her ability to bring people together. Borrowing from Erich Auerbach, I inquire whether this apotheosis of the modern artist portends a humanist utopia or an elitist dystopia. Finally, countering those socio-political readings, and borrowing from James Wood, I interpret art in To the Lighthouse as a confrontation with and a vision of the raw void or vortex at the heart of life—a confrontation and a vision even unto death, whether the death of the individual artist or of the social order at large. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is free to all in its entirety as a preview of what paid subscribers enjoy every week: it’s about the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. I discuss Lawrence’s life as the first English working-class novelist, his travails as his sexually explicit and politically rebellious work met with controversy and censorship, and his flight from England across the world from Italy to Australia to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s famous artist colony in New Mexico. I consider his difficult social, political, and metaphysical thought, which some have called “fascist,” and his once celebrated and then despised theories of love and sexuality, with comments on Frances Wilson’s recent Lawrence biography, Burning Man, and on Lawrence’s own most controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent. I then turn to an appreciation of Lawrence’s stylistic move from realism to modernism and his innovative approach to fictional characterization in early stories like “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Prussian Officer.” I consider his ambitious middle-period manifestoes for modernist fiction and for free verse in the essays “Why the Novel Matters” and “The Poetry of the Present.” Finally, I read Lawrence’s later poems “Snake” and “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” as they transvalue the traditional values of the Christian and Enlightened west and become occult and Orphic free-verse hymns to a new interrelation of soul and body, humanity and nature, heaven and hell. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is 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 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of W. B. Yeats. I discuss Yeats’s biography as his art goes from late Romanticism to a high modernism amid the turbulence of Ireland’s liberation and under the influence of spiritual forces. Yeats’s controversial political views and his occult philosophies are considered. Then we turn to some of the finest English-language poems of the 20th century. We investigate the pastoral Romantic nationalism of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the epic-tragic anti-colonialism of the ambivalently elegiac “Easter, 1916,” the mythic and occult significance of the apocalyptic “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” the ambiguous spiritual escapism of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the Nietzschean aristocratic tragic heroism of “Lapis Lazuli,” and the earthy farewell to poetry and spiritual transcendence of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

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 about the life and work of Joseph Conrad, with a focus on his novel of anarchism and terrorism, The Secret Agent. I first discuss Conrad’s biography: his harrowing childhood as the son of a Polish nationalist under Russian occupation; his seafaring years in the merchant marine amid the industrial revolution in sailing from wind to steam power; and his gradual rise to prominence as a major novelist in British and world letters. I make several remarks about Heart of Darkness, his most famous work, and about his sometimes controversial reception by writers, critics, and biographers like Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Maya Jasanoff, while also emphasizing his enormous influence on British, American, and postcolonial literature. I then turn to Conrad’s own modernist manifesto of l’art pour l’art as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conrad’s thriller The Secret Agent in the history of anarchism and terrorism in the late 19th century. Finally, I offer a reading of this novel stressing its satire on radicalism and radical chic, its formal assault on the standardization of time and the fetishism of science, its depiction of murderous freedom and redemptive empire, its atopic portrait of the placeless and denationalized modern city, and its dueling visions of the nihilist terrorist and the compassionate idiot as exemplary modern artists. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

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 about the life and work of Oscar Wilde. I begin with a recitation of Wilde’s dramatic life story with its consciously shaped tragic arc—the tragedy he lived but could not write—with passing remarks on most of his major work and on his Aestheticist philosophy. I elaborate on his revolutionary literary theory, which sunders art from mimesis and criticism itself from truth: a postmodernism of the fin de siècle. Then, in the light of this theory, I offer a formalist interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest. I reads the comedy as a device for producing Wildean epigrams, among them epigrams that mock Victorian sententiousness, epigrams that express Wilde’s own Aestheticism, and, finally, epigrams of pure contentless wit anticipating the linguistic experiments of high modernism and postmodernism in writers like Stein, Joyce, Stevens, and Ashbery. I consider critics on The Importance of Being Earnest: Terence Brown on the play as the utopia of the dandy; Camille Paglia on the play as “reactionary prose poem,” the first piece of modernist fascist art; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the play as celebration of the “avunculate,” those aunts and uncles who model for the budding queer child the pleasure and promise of non-normative sexualities. Finally, in anticipation of the next episode on Conrad and early modernist fiction, I emphasize the play’s withering attitude toward the Victorian novel as the antitype to its Aestheticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.