Paideia Today

Episode 2 of Season four again sets the foundation for the Modernist movement, looking at the two superb poetic craftsman, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman.  What is noteworthy about the two, besides their aesthetic excellence, is the way they capture a fin-de-siecle cultural despair and express its pervasive sense of alienation.  While the First World War will devastate much of Western Christendom, it is important to note that the dissonant notes to the leitmotif of social progress are already being sounded by these two important poets.

Season 4 of Paideia Today begins with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde.  Wilde initiates literary modernism, which in turn sows the seeds of a sort of postmodernism rarely discussed by those tracing the history of ideas.    It is vital, however, because it connects the pursuit of a rather ugly 'aesthetics' movement with an assault on goodness and truth.  Goodness, beauty, and truth have been seen to be connected since the ancient world.  But in literary modernism, we see the doctrinal severance of beauty from notions of morality and truth.  Horaces's dictum for the poet was 'to teach and to delight'.  Wilde's pursuit of delight, however, is presented in an amoral fashion (in keeping with the fashionable agnosticism of his era).  It is no accident that the twentieth century was marked by what C.S. Lewis described as 'the Abolition of Man', but also by a total departure from the educational aims of the world prior to then, in pursuit of a transhumanist and often posthumanist ideal.

For the conclusion of season 3 of Paideia Today we look at the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.  Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, engages with the modern alienation from life that progressive ideology and commitment to material advances.  Rather than one of Tolstoy's magisterial novels like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, we look at his brilliant novella, which addresses themes concerning wisdom and virtue, themes often very much ignored in fiction thereafter.

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment catalogues the life of a young political idealist who commits two murders to fulfill his ambition.  It is an exceptionally subtle and complex narrative, which not only leans on elements of Dostoevsky's own biography, but situates them within a Christian framework of guilt and redemption.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and until recently was one of the most popular British poets.  But he has been seriously neglected in recent years.  In this episode of Paideia Today, we discuss his most important poem.

Today's episode of Paideia Today looks at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  This fascinating novel represents an amalgamation of various strands of the novel tradition, but arguably begins a new one, that of science fiction.  In the process, Shelley also begins a prescient critique of the transhumanist impulse of the modern scientist, or modern Prometheus, as she calls him, and his abandonment of the ethics of love in pursuit of allegedly humanitarian progress.

Jane Austen is without doubt one of the finest prose stylists and keenest observers of human nature.    We discuss Austen as a novelist in the light of that eighteenth century genre, noting that her clear satire is what marks her as a great moral writer.  The focus of our discussion is her splendid novel Pride and Prejudice, a masterpiece in tracing the lineaments of fallen humanity, and the proud flaws of even its most admirable characters, here represented in the characters of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with giving the definitive take on the imagination, the faculty all the Romantics claim marks their distinctive poetic experiment.  But is Coleridge's definition actually more a critique of Romantic poetics than an expression of it?  This episode begins by discussing his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but ranges to discuss a broad array of topics.

William Wordsworth is the poet most strongly identified with a literary movement we call Romantic.  Today's episode discusses many of the complex features of that movement while also engaging with some of the work by the great poet.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is a colossal figure who bestrides the age lying between the age of Pope and the Romantics.  In acknowledgement of his extraordinary erudition, he is often referred to as Dr. Johnson.  Dr. Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.  He is an important figure not only for conservative thinking, but the English moral sense tradition.  On today's episode, we discuss this much-overlooked but enormously important literary figure.