Close Readings

Our pioneering podcast subscription: two contributors explore an area of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to extracts from each episodes, and some full free episodes, here.

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Human Conditions: 'Black Music' by Amiri Baraka

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam Shatz, 12 November 2024

10 November 2024 · 17mins

In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, it provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation.

On Satire: 'A Handful of Dust' by Evelyn Waugh

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell, 12 November 2024

4 November 2024 · 16mins

In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit.

28 October 2024 · 11mins

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude.

Among the Ancients II: Juvenal

Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, 12 November 2024

24 October 2024 · 14mins

Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate – immigration, sexual mores and eating habits all come under fire. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits.

Human Conditions: ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam Shatz, 12 November 2024

10 October 2024 · 01min

Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.

On Satire: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow, 12 November 2024

4 October 2024 · 11mins

By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future.

Political Poems: 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford, 12 November 2024

28 September 2024 · 12mins

In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months.

Among the Ancients II: Tacitus

Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, 12 November 2024

24 September 2024 · 12mins

The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclass in political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Annals rewarding, as well as difficult, reading and discuss Tacitus’ knotty style and approach to history.

Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part One

Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu, 12 November 2024

18 September 2024 · 45mins

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been hurt by love, a love ‘more fervent than any other love’, and intends his work as a guide to life and love for young women in particular. In the first of two episodes on Boccaccio’s hundred novelle of sex, dishonesty and foolishness, Mary and Irina consider why both the preface and first story – about the disreputable merchant Cepparello – start with a confession, before looking at the later tale of the gardener Masetto and his noble efforts tending to the needs of every nun in a convent in Lamporecchio.

Human Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam Shatz, 12 November 2024

10 September 2024 · 13mins

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the twentieth century. Souls was an immediate bestseller, the subject of furious debate and a foundational work in the new field of sociology.

On Satire: Byron’s ‘Don Juan’

Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow, 12 November 2024

4 September 2024 · 17mins

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza.

28 August 2024 · 57mins

‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.

Among the Ancients II: Lucan

Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, 13 November 2024

24 August 2024 · 13mins

In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview.

Medieval LOLs: ‘Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle’

Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu, 12 November 2024

18 August 2024 · 40mins

The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. Irina and Mary discuss his incarnation in 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later version of the character in which many of his traditional traits are exaggerated to the extreme.

Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Pankaj Mishra and Adam Shatz, 12 November 2024

10 August 2024 · 14mins

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.