Great American Novel

Episode 29: Rallying Around the Flag in Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE


Listen Later

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the edges and giving scattershot glimpses of confusion, guilt, regret, and even envy and resentment. Through the story of Private Henry Fleming (aka "The Youth"), Red Badge is arguably the novel that best encapsulates the phrase "the fog of war," a term credited to the 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In this episode we explore how Crane---who was not yet born when the battle of Chancellorsville that is the setting occurred---managed to capture the experience so authentically that Union veterans assumed he had worn the blue alongside them. The novel launched its twenty-four-year-old author into the type of fame few writers experience: as a journalist, pulp writer, and celebrity observer of international conflagrations (not to mention fan of bordellos), Crane epitomized the image of the author as a globetrotting adventurer---an image only elevated to tragic irony when he died from tuberculosis in 1900.   

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Great American NovelBy Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt

  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5

5

79 ratings


More shows like Great American Novel

View all
The Political Scene | The New Yorker by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

3,954 Listeners

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast by Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

2,096 Listeners

Philosophize This! by Stephen West

Philosophize This!

15,093 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,399 Listeners

The History of Literature by Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

The History of Literature

1,101 Listeners

Backlisted by Backlisted

Backlisted

582 Listeners

Philosophy For Our Times by IAI

Philosophy For Our Times

304 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

111,917 Listeners

Rev Left Radio by Revolutionary Left Radio

Rev Left Radio

3,270 Listeners

Weird Studies by SpectreVision Radio

Weird Studies

586 Listeners

Hermitix by Hermitix

Hermitix

343 Listeners

Strict Scrutiny by Crooked Media

Strict Scrutiny

5,697 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,335 Listeners

Reading McCarthy by Scott Yarbrough and Guest Hosts

Reading McCarthy

139 Listeners

If Books Could Kill by Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri

If Books Could Kill

8,892 Listeners