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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about George Sand’s novel Indiana. We discuss Sand—the most popular European novelist in her time—as exemplary of the fate of Romantic, idealist, popular, and women’s fiction after the later 19th- and early 20th-century dominance of realism, naturalism, and modernism. We consider Sand’s androgyny, progressivism, and feminism, and her reception by Anglophone writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. We explore Indiana as a novel in which realism and romance battle for aesthetic hegemony. We examine its place in the French politics of its time—the end of the Bourbon Restoration—and its own ideologies of gender, empire, nation, race, and class. We finally weigh the continued viability of the aesthetics of romance and idealism today. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. We speculate on Stendhal as both the first modern novelist and as the inaugural figure of the modern artist qua reactionary-revolutionary aristocrat-radical aesthete standing athwart bourgeois society. We stress the novel’s psychological analysis, metafictional technique, gender ambiguity, and political and religious critique, as well as Stendhal’s general prescience as a writer looking forward to (and influencing) later figures from Balzac to Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wilde to Camus. We emphasize Stendhal’s elevation of love, art, and nature over the quest for advancement within the social world. We quote Erich Auerbach and René Girard as important critical authorities on the novel. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Paradiso. We consider the arrangement of Dante’s heaven, his political views, and his treatment of theological controversies over damnation and salvation. We further explore the poet’s conception of the poem as an epic quest and its bearing on issues of gender and spirituality. Finally, we consider major modern critics on Dante: T. S. Eliot, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, and Harold Bloom. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Purgatorio. We dwell, in this most human of the Divine Comedy’s three canticles, on Dante’s portrayal of poetic tradition and lineage, his critique of reason, and the tension between his realistic and allegorical tendencies. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Inferno. We consider the conceptual and philosophical basis of Dante’s afterlife, his sense of sin and punishment, his placement of himself within the western poetic lineage, his attack on avarice as the ruin of secular and spiritual power, and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This free bonus episode, the prologue to a three-part series on the Divine Comedy, is about the life, times, and poetics of Dante. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription to access the rest of the Invisible College archive, including our three future Dante episodes. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is on Virgil’s Aeneid. We discuss the distinction between the Greek and Roman character; Virgil’s posthumous canonization as prophet and magician; his belated contrivance on Homer’s model of a founding epic for Rome and its possible source in elite and imperial patronage; the poem’s decadent evasion of the martial destiny it narrates; its ambiguous portrait of love and war; the metaphysics of its underworld; its contest of masculine and feminine and interest in queerness; the mythical archetypes (Venus, Juno, Saturn, Mars, Diana) it mobilizes; and more. We end with Paglia’s stern reading of its sexual personae and Borges’s warm tribute to Virgil as patron of poetry. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is the third in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this episode, we consider Alyosha’s assembly of his young apostles, Ivan’s encounter with the devil, Smerdyakov’s confession, and the trial of Dmitri, all with an eye toward elaborating the novel’s social and spiritual themes. Plus: could Alyosha be the real killer? I begin and end with a comparison among The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov, and conclude with reflections on Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky from Georg Lukács and Susan Sontag. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. After a proem triangulating Dostoevsky with Žižek and Tarkovsky, I move on to the discuss perhaps the novel’s richest and most famous episodes—Ivan’s return of his ticket to God and parable of the Grand Inquisitor and the life and homilies of the Elder Zosima—and what they tell us about totalitarianism and freedom, atheism and Christianity and more. We further explore the narrative’s tangled romances, the developing murder plot, and metafictional reflections on Dostoevsky’s art of the novel. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind 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 introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We discuss the novel’s themes of self-sacrifice, the corruption of innocence, contradictions and dialectics, sensuality vs. intellectualism vs. spirituality, domination and sadism, the roles of religious elders and holy fools, and more, plus some remarks on translation and aesthetics, and a startling poetic appearance of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: