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John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary history. Its impact was profound and immediate: rarely has a novel been so viciously denounced simply for promoting the belief that all Americans deserve to make a living. But the novel has also been celebrated as a testament to democratic protest, inspiring folks songs by Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen that have in turn been covered by later generations of musicians such as Rage Against the Machine. This episode explores what makes the novel such a fan favorite, as well as the pros and cons of tackling politics in literature. We examine the curious role of Steinbeck's intercalary chapters, which, alternating with the story of the displaced Joad family, raise their plight to mythic levels. We also dig deep into the journalistic inspiration for the novel as well as its Hollywood legacy with John Ford's classic 1940 adaptation. 

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The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West.  This 1985 tome of McCarthy’s has engaged constant discussion and speculation due to the high poetry of its language and the stark horror of its violence.  Saddle up and touch your heels to your horse to hear our wide-ranging discussion of this novel.

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  All opinions are those of the hosts and do not reflect the views of their home institutions. 

All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

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Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress across the prairies: it was a story of immigrants struggling to realize the American Dream that appeared in an era of extreme xenophobia that will feel painfully resonant to contemporary readers. In telling the story of the resilient Ántonia Shimerda and other "hired girls" from Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) and other Eastern European states, Cather paid tribute to real-life migrants she had grown up with in Red Cloud, Nebraska, a small but artistically vibrant train depot that today does a thriving business in Cather tourism. In addition to Cather's powerful style and her warm memories of farming struggles, we focus on the friendship between Ántonia and the orphaned narrator, Jim Burden. At the end of the day, My Ántonia is possibly the greatest story about a platonic friendship between a woman and a man in American literature.    

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The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  

In Episode 12 our intrepid profcasters lay into the most controversial novel of the 20th Century, Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA.  Is it Great?  Is it American?  What do we make of the controversies, the films?  We tackle the book and try to search for the real Dolores Haze within the text, and consider the best way to read Humbert Humbert, much less how we should pronounce his name (not to mention the author's). 

Film trailer clips are from the Kubrick 1962 film and the 1997 film by Adrian Lyne.  All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com.

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Our eleventh episode explores the most recent novel on our list of celebrated Great American Novels, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of Christian humanism, GILEAD. Set in a fictional small Iowa town in 1956, this deceptively lowkey narrative about a dying minister, John Ames, and the sudden reappearance of the town's prodigal son, Jack Boughton, raises intriguing questions about the intersection of the soul and society. Robinson is our most prominent representative of literary or philosophical Christianity today; in a marketplace in which the very notion of Christian fiction raises doctrinaire stereotypes of the rapture and the second coming, she is the rare writer who dramatizes faith as a quiet struggle between personal practice and cultural politics. Jack returns to Gilead with a secret he is convinced will challenge the drowsy, contemplative ministries of both his godfather, Ames, a Congregationalist, and his own father, Robert, a staunch Presbyterian. Jack's revelation raises questions about the function of the Church that locals may not wish to confront. But if this conflict sounds melodramatic, GILEAD is a novel of profound serenity: with a poetic style we call "conversational imagism," Robinson dramatizes the plenitude of God's presence not through fiery epiphanies but through arresting images of the natural world's divinity that pay homage to nineteenth-century American Romanticists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Known for her passionate defense of John Calvin and the Puritans as theologists, Robinson depicts faith not as a battle between the spirit and the flesh but between the humility and egotism of individual belief. Few novels have ever so clearly dramatized the relationship between the vulnerability of the religious self and the fragile exercise of democracy.  

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The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  

 In conversation with writer Gertrude Stein, a Parisian mechanic disparaged the young and dissolute men who’d survived the Great War by calling them lost; Stein later tells Ernest Hemingway,  “You are all a Lost Generation.”  And so this 10th episode is a consideration of the Hemingway novel which, alongside The Great Gatsby, defines the Lost Generation of the post-World War I era for all of us: the masterful The Sun Also Rises.  We dig deep into the Papa legend, warts and all, and give the book a thorough and thoughtful reflection, taking coffee and cognac in the cafes of Montparnasse and running with the bulls in Pamplona even as we try for a few trout in the streams above Roncevalles.  Instead of canon fodder this time we  take a moment to reflect on  two losses to American Literary studies which bookended the year 2021 for us.  

 The film audio clips are from The Sun Also Rises, directed in 1957 by Henry King and staring Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner, among others (including an irascible aging Errol Flynn as Mike Campbell), and produced by Daryl F. Zanuck for 20th Century Fox. 

 All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the intermission is “The First Minute,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction of the relationship between the naive sprite Huck and the runaway slave Jim at once appeals to the American desire for harmonious race relations while probing blindspots in our national notions of equality. Twain employs several motifs associated with GANs---the journey, the river, the notion of the moral education--but at its core is a satirical impulse to question manners, pretentions, and aristocracies. Our discussion explores Twain's use of vernacular, the controversies surrounding both the prodigious use of the N-word and the final section of the novel (in which Tom and Huck play pranks on Jim instead of rescuing him from slavery), and what it means for our cultural notions of maturity that men want to "light out for the Territory" to avoid being "sivilized." 

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The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  

 Our 8th episode is a consideration of one of the most significant works of Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.  We dive deep into Morrison’s 6th novel, BELOVED, and consider the ways our culture is still wrestling with the demons she evokes in this 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Based partly on the true story of escaped slave Margaret Garner, Beloved tells the story of Sethe and her community, and asks what it means to be haunted by a past that cannot be buried, even if people would just as soon not pass the story on.  

 Our canon fodder suggestion in this episode is Margaret Walker’s 1966 novel, Jubilee. 

 All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the midpoint intermission is “The First Minute,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information see here: https://locolobomusic.com/.

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In our seventh episode we explore a Great American Novel that's so ubiquitous it's almost hard to believe there was a time when the media wasn't full of contrast, random references to The Great Gatsby. The story of a mysterious millionaire who turns up on Long Island, throwing lavish parties and spinning fables as transparently invented as they are enthralling, captures something essential about the promise of America. We explore why the term used for that something---the American dream---falls flat in this day and age, and what exactly we can still learn about class boundaries in a democracy that promises prosperity and affluence for anyone willing to work for it. The Great Gatsby is an easy book to take for granted: there are so many movie versions, so many theatre and opera and ballet adaptations, that we can forget just how beautiful F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose can ring out if we stop to listen to it. We dive deep into the novel's own mythic backstory, in which a young and successful author aims for high art only to discover the public would rather he stick with formulaic romance stories. Jay Gatsby remains one of the most indelible creations in American literary history: a version of Stephen Foster's beautiful dreamer, a self-fabulist who fools nobody but himself and yet intrigues everyone.   

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The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  

 This episode focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s classic, revered novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  We discuss the complicated history of Hurston’s interactions with the elite of the Harlem Renaissance and the reaction of some of those literati to the novel, and we dig deep in a thorough consideration of the themes and motifs of the book.  

 For Canon Fodder, we suggest James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

 All show music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley”; the midpoint intermission is “The First Moment,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information see here: https://locolobomusic.com/.

Website: https://greatamericannovel.buzzsprout.com/