Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power, especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet all this seems to earn him is an all-expenses-paid European vacation—notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide—to be followed by eternal damnation. What’s the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? Wes & Erin discuss Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus."

Post-Doctoral Bedevilment in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus”

SUBTEXT is a podcast about the human condition, and what we can learn about it from the greatest inventions of the human imagination: fiction, film, drama, poetry, essays, and criticism. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh explore life’s big questions by conducting a close reading of a text or film and co-writing an audio essay about it in real time.

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In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade" seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails.

Consciousness Bemoaned in Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” (Part 1)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Orson Welles’s "Citizen Kane." 

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextfree and use code subtextfree for free breakfast for life.

Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 2)

It’s a film bursting with objects—the treasure troves of Xanadu, a snowglobe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner’s cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film’s plot are expressed tangibly. Kane’s mind-boggling wealth isn’t an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings—gold mines, oil wells, real estate. And the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one’s hands: a newspaper. Kane, too, is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was “news,” as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they’re made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast, empty planet around which objects swirl. What’s at his core, then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane bets that just one fact—the identity of “Rosebud”—would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it’s in the sum total of his possessions. Yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane’s actions won’t tell us who he really was. So what, then, determines his or any identity? What’s the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for? Their actions? Or something still deeper? Wes & Erin discuss possibly the greatest film ever made: from 1941, Orson Welles’s "Citizen Kane."

Identity and Infamy in “Citizen Kane” (1941) (Part 1)

Part 6 of Wes & Erin's discussion of Shakespeare’s "The Winter’s Tale." 

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John's College. Learn more about undergraduate--and graduate--Great Books programs at St. John's in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.

Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 6)

Part 5 of Wes & Erin's discussion of Shakespeare’s "The Winter’s Tale." 

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John's College. Learn more about undergraduate--and graduate--Great Books programs at St. John's in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.

Post-Doctoral Bedevilment in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus”

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