Paideia Today

William Faulkner is acknowledge to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His scintillating writing, masterful plots, mesmerizing characters, and shocking perspective make him the other great pioneer of Southern Gothic (along with Flannery O'Connor) and one of the Southern Renaissance's most intriguing voices. In this episode, Drs. Masson and Friesen focus in on one of his best known short stories, "A Rose for Emily," exploring its curious mix of the macabre and the illuminating.

Today we discuss a flagship work of Post-Modernism, Waiting for Godot. This is one of the seminal works which signals the way forward for culture and its art in the Post-Modernist era (1945-2001). We explore the evolution of our current angst, nihilism and vast loneliness. It is easy to dismiss this play as ridiculous, which it is, but that does not keep it from being incredibly important to where we find ourselves today. 

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is the greatest author of the the twentieth century.  At least he is by popular acclaim.  In the eyes of the critics and the literary establishment, he has been virtually ignored.  In this episode we open what could be a lengthy discussion of this author, seeking to explain the utter divergence of opinion on Tolkien.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.  His reputation, however, only really advanced in the light of the atrocities of the Nazi regime.  Kafka was Jewish.  Like Orwell, Kafka's name has become synonymous with the type of world he portrays, in Kafka's case a world operating under an absurd series of conditions in which human freedom is rendered meaningless, and in which human nature becomes utterly dehumanized.

Today's episode focuses on Flannery O'Connor (1925–64), an American writer famed for her 'southern Gothic' style.  We will read O'Connor as a Christian realist who portrays the depravity of the human condition with unusual acuity, set as it is in sharp relief against the backdrop of Southern gentility.

In today's episode of Paideia Today, we look at the famed British novelist George Orwell (1903-50), whose work is so harrowing the adjective Orwellian has come to describe the peculiarly modern form of totalitarian technocracy.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.  We spend the majority of the episode looking at Yeats' most famous poem and observe the way it reflects the worldview of his era.

W.H. Auden (1907 –1973) is one of the great poets of the twentieth century.  Some regard him as a lesser poet to Yeats and Eliot - we discuss that here -  but he was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects.  Unlike Eliot, who migrated from America to Britain, Auden did the opposite.  His reputation grew after his death as well, which is usually a good sign of merit.

T.S. Eliot has been embraced as a great poet on both sides of the Atlantic.  Born in the United States, Eliot emigrated to England and remained there.  He became the key figure of the Modernist movement.  We discuss Eliot's poetry as well as the movement itself in this week's episode.

Joseph Conrad is an extraordinary figure, not least because he wrote his novels in his second language.  His novella Heart of Darkness is justly famous for its depiction of the evil of the human heart in the context of the 'scramble for Africa'.  It has been variously described as a 'colonialist' and a 'postcolonialist' novella.

While there is no dispute that the expansion of the European powers into Africa is its contemporary context, and there is a critique of colonialism in the text, we dismiss it as reductive to see Conrad's work solely in that light.