Open Book

Open Book

By Michael UllyotArtsBooks
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Open Book episodes

  • How to Read to Cure Yourself

    Today’s topic is bibliotherapy, or “literary remedies for the mind and body,” as Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin write. They’re the authors of The Novel Cure (published 2013), a clever reference book of mental and physical ailments that readers can treat by reading novels, which offer either cure or consolation. 

    13 min
  • How to Read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books 2-3

    There are three parts of this episode, which follows Episode 3 of this season:

    1. First, we’ll consider how Milton, the blind poet, deals with the difficulty of describing indescribable things; 
    2. then we’ll resume the story with the debate in Hell, and discover how the Oxford English Dictionary can illuminate its terms; 
    3. and finally we’ll eavesdrop on a conversation between God and his Son, to consider how God can know what will happen without causing it to happen, and how God and Milton endow characters with traits to respond to their circumstances. 

      4. As ever, the source of my quotations from Paradise Lost is Gordon Teskey’s 2005 Norton edition.

      33 min
    4. How to Read Dante’s Inferno, Canto 5

      The three parts of today’s episode surround each other like the concentric rings of hell. (Maybe not the best metaphor?)

      1. First I’ll briefly describe the story of Dante’s Inferno; 
      2. and then I’ll guide you toward the second circle of Hell, where our narrator meets those spirits punished for lust; 
      3. and finally I’ll introduce you to Paulo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers who were seduced by a book to seduce each other.

        4. My source of all quotations from Dante in this episode are from the translation of Robert and Jean Hollander, published by Doubleday in 2000. 

        18 min
      5. How to Read Plato’s Phaedrus

        This episode is about written language, as the Greek philosopher Plato describes it in his dialogue Phaedrus.

        The Latin proverb I cite is Verba volant, scripta manent; and the Greek word that means both 'cure' and 'poison' is pharmakon.

        The quotation from John Milton is from Areopagitica (1644).

        Selections from Plato’s Phaedrus are from Benjamin Jowett’s 1892 translation, as cited in the anthology Critical Theory Since Plato, 3rd edition of 2005, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle.

        14 min
      6. The What and the How

        In this inaugural episode, I describe the podcast's coverage and format, and then introduce myself and my motives for hosting the series. I conclude: "Think of the episodes in this series as a set of exploratory essays, of varying lengths, gathering evidence from sources on some central topic. The topics will vary, but each episode of Open Book will (I hope) do just what it says on the tin: open a book to your mind."

        Here are the five book titles I'll cover this season:

        1. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Part 1, 1605; Part 2, 1615; we’re reading selections from the 2003 Edith Grossman translation);
        2. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803; we’re using the 2013 David M. Shapard edition);
        3. David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr Apelles (2006);
        4. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667; in the 2005 Norton edition of Gordon Teskey; the more recent 2020 edition appeared too late for this series); and
        5. selections from Metaphysical Poetry (Colin Burrow’s 2006 Penguin anthology).
          6. 17 min
        6. Trailer

          Introducing a new podcast series on how to read like an English Professor -- with Michael Ullyot of the University of Calgary. 

          5 min

        About Open Book

        From the publisher's feed

        A podcast about reading texts like an English professor. Your host is Michael Ullyot, Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. Episodes are designed to appeal to curious and…

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