Close Readings

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13.

Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism.

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

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

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

Read the poems:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm

Further reading and listening from the LRB:

On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed:

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

Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠

Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly⁠

Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy⁠

Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠

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Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation.

Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief⁠⁠⁠

Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me⁠⁠⁠

Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned⁠⁠⁠

Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo⁠⁠⁠

Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

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What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an action of consciousness as it tries to rearrange the world to suit itself, or as he puts it at the end of his book: a sudden fall of consciousness into magic. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss why Sartre’s rejection of the idea of the subconscious is not as much a departure from Freud’s theories as he thought they were, and the ways in which his attempt to establish a ‘phenomenological psychology’ manifested in other works, including Nausea, Being and Nothingness and The Words.

Note: Readers should use the translation by Philip Mairet. The earlier one by Bernard Frechtman, as Jonathan explains in the episode, contains numerous (often amusing) errors.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Jonathan Rée on 'Being and Nothingness': ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre1⁠

Sissela Bok on Sartre's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre2⁠

Edwards Said's encounter with Sartre: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre3⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre':

⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

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'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels.

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

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

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

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1

David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2

Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

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Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy.

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

Poems discussed in this episode:

William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont

Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell

Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song

Anne Carson, Nox

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson

Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.

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Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year

In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to 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:

Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley1⁠

Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley2⁠

Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth:

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley3⁠

Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley4⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world we experience is one of dynamic movement between revelation and concealment, where the essential nature of a thing lies in its ‘thinging’, and the ‘jug’s jug character consists in the poured gift of the jug’s pouring out’. In this episode Jonathan and James work through Heidegger’s ideas about both ‘things’ and time, and consider the purpose of his poetic style.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Richard Rorty: Heidegger's Worlds

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/richard-rorty/diary⁠

J.P. Stern: Heil Heidegger

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n08/j.p.-stern/heil-heidegger⁠

James Miller: Arendt and Heidegger

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/james-miller/thinking-without-a-banister

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠

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The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life.

Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: https://lrb.me/naeliot1

Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: https://lrb.me/naeliot2

Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: https://lrb.me/naeliot3

Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: https://lrb.me/naeliot4

Audiobooks from the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words.

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

Poems discussed in this episode:

Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’

⁠https://⁠⁠w⁠⁠ww.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night⁠

Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’

⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57⁠

Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’

⁠https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/⁠

W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’

⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death⁠

Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’

⁠https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/⁠

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’

⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters:

⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar1⁠

Jonathan Bate on war poetry:

⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar2⁠

Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB:

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar3⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this episode, Marina and Adam look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Liam McIlvanney on James Hogg:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov1⁠

Michael Wood on Bulgakov:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov2⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠

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