Close Readings Podcast

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the possibilities of elegy more extensively than any English poem before it, not least in its innovative, incantatory rhyme scheme, intended to numb the pain of grief. From its repeated dramatisations of the experience of private loss, 'In Memoriam' opens out to reflect on the intellectual turmoil running through Victorian society amid monumental advances in scientific thought. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the unique emotional power of Tennyson’s style, and why his great elegy came to represent what mourning, and poetry, should be in the public imagination of his time.

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Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

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Read more in the LRB:

Frank Kermode:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n09/frank-kermode/eliot-and-the-shudder⁠

Seamus Perry:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/seamus-perry/are-we-there-yet⁠

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‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years apart but drew on the period of the Napoleonic wars: Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen). Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) is a complex sequence of tales within tales, written from the point of view of the early 19th century but describing events in Spain in the 18th century. It’s a powerful commentary on the preoccupations of the Enlightenment and the repression of historical guilt. In Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Dinesen confronts some of the most unsettling aspect of sexual guilt and desire with psychological astuteness. Adam and Marina discuss the ways in which, in both works, the gothic was able to explore areas of human experience that other genres struggled to accommodate.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Read more in the LRB:

On Potocki:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n02/p.n.-furbank/nesting-time⁠

On 'Out of Africa':

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n12/d.a.n.-jones/the-old-feudalist⁠

On Denisen's letters:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/errol-trzebinski/perfect-bliss-and-perfect-despair

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For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection with three other essays – on Wagner, David Strauss and the use of history – that has come to be titled Untimely Meditations. In this episode Jonathan and James consider the essays together and their powerful attack on the ethos of the age, railing against the greed and power of the state, fake art, overweening science, the triviality of universities and, perhaps above all, the deification of success.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Read more in the LRB:

David Hoy on Nietzsche's life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n01/david-hoy/different-stories⁠

J.P. Stern on 'Unmodern Observations' (or 'Untimely Meditations'):

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n16/j.p.-stern/impatience⁠

Jenny Diski on Elisabeth Nietzsche:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasn-t-him-it-was-her⁠

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In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters.

Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Read more in the LRB:

Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n19/dinah-birch/the-unwritten-fiction-of-dead-brothers

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/rosemarie-bodenheimer/secret-keeping

John Bayley: Mrs G

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/john-bayley/mrs-g

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Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne’s laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift’s breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Read more in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Plath:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n16/jacqueline-rose/this-is-not-a-biography⁠

David Runciman on Larkin and his father:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n03/david-runciman/a-funny-feeling⁠

John Bayley on Larkin

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n08/john-bayley/the-last-romantic⁠

Matthew Bevis on Hardy:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare

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