Open Book

Examine Shakespeare's tragedy of love, jealousy, and manipulation. From Venice's political intricacy to Cyprus's contested shores, we analyse how Shakespeare intertwines personal drama with geopolitical conflict. Explore why *Othello* continues to engage audiences over 400 years after its premiere.

Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy, written around 1580 and published posthumously in 1595, is the first significant work of literary criticism in English. This episode explores Sidney's arguments for poetry's power to teach and delight, his concept of the poet as a creator of "golden worlds," and his assertion of poetry's superiority over other disciplines in moving readers to virtuous action.

NOTE: I say 1580 was “340 years ago,” but of course that’s off by a century. English professors evidently can’t do math.

For my complete read-through of The Defence of Poesy, start here.

Richard Wagamese’s 2014 novel Medicine Walk is the story of Franklin Starlight’s journey of mutual discovery with his dying father. It’s a novel about storytelling, and the personal and cultural identities that stories confer; but also about humans knowing their place on the land — a knowledge that goes beyond words and theories to experience, to embodiment rather than mental understanding.

Tom McCarthy’s C is a 2010 novel of ideas that addresses a wide array of scientific, historical, and cultural topics. Like McCarthy’s five other novels, it tells a complex and multi-layered story intertwined with disquisitions on art, memory, trauma, science, technology, and other mid-expanding topics. It’s written in a style that calls attention to its methods, surprising you recurrently with its perceptive and beautiful language.

An introduction to the major themes of Forster’s 1910 novel of modern life. It’s the story of two sisters, Helen and Margaret Schlegel, and their relationships with the Wilcox family, headed by its patriarch Henry Wilcox: a successful industrial capitalist, who has neither the Schlegels’ values of literature and art, nor sympathy for the lower classes of men like Leonard Bast, who aspires to those higher values.

An introduction to the biographical circumstances and major themes of Wuthering Heights, a novel by Emily Brontë published in two volumes in 1847 — a year before her death the age of 30. It’s a love story, a portrait of two families in rural northern England. Its most compelling character, Heathcliff, provokes varying reactions of sympathy and exasperation for his responses to others’ mistreatment and disregard.

Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Hours, tells the intertwined stories of three 20th-century women: the modernist author Virginia Woolf, in London; the midcentury housewife Laura Brown, in Los Angeles; and the late-90s literary editor and hostess Clarissa Vaughan, in New York City. Although Clarissa imagines an alternate “life as potent and dangerous as literature itself,” ultimately she reconciles herself to “an hour here or there when our lives … burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.”

Like a cubist painting, Virginia Woolf’s narrative style offers multiple simultaneous perspectives on simple objects: dogs, trees, a day in June 1923. Were Woolf a realist writer, Mrs Dalloway would be far more straightforward: a middle-aged woman reflects on her life and reunites with friends as she prepares to host a party; a war veteran, meanwhile, dies by suicide after unsympathetic medical treatment of his PTSD. By using stream-of-consciousness methods for multiple characters in this novel, Woolf grants us access to their minds — excavating insight and beauty from the very ordinariness of life.

If you like this episode, you’ll also enjoy S02E07, “How to Read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.”

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker-Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, is a perfect illustration of the novel’s power to make you empathize with characters unlike yourself. It’s about black womanhood, but it’s also about being unconfined to your identity. 

Correction: The character married to Giles, who reads Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, is not Shirley but Penelope.

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” Jane Austen declared about Emma Woodhouse, the only heroine of her six novels to earn its title. The first novel in English written in a free indirect style, Emma has the lasting effect of making novels the standard form for readers to empathize with characters who may be very unlike ourselves.