Professing Literature

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. It takes many years and great disappointment for Pip to understand what happened to him. The protagonist of Dickens’ novel lives amid hope and fear, unaware of who it is that shaped his life and what he should really value. His story is about coming to terms with his responsibility, forgiving the ones who had hurt him and learning to see and accept the truth.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "The Diary" by CJ-0

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J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is one of the most beloved writers in the English tradition, though that popularity is a source of frustration to many supposedly sophisticated critics and scholars. However, his fans and his detractors alike often miss not just how carefully constructed his fiction is but how seriously it explores perennial human concerns: death, change, sacrifice, guilt, creation. Above all, his writing reflects a profound sense that though the world is broken it is beautiful and good and destined for ultimate renewal.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "The Birth of a Planet" by Falls

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John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. John Donne came of age in a high culture whose notions of love were shaped by writers like Philip Sidney. Donne’s own love poetry, though, was very different. Scandalously frank, experimental, intellectually complex, Donne disdains the traditional conventions. Whether praising the beloved or excoriating her, whether writing to a nameless woman in the days of his bachelorhood or the wife to whom he became devoted, Donne strives for emotional realism and intimacy.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "A Love that Once Was" by Jakob Gavin Luke

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Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella.  Over the course of the sixteenth century English poets experimented with the sonnet form invented by their Italian neighbours, and the Petrarchan conventions that came with it.  The goal was a long sequence of many short poems which chronicle the emotional chaos springing from unrequited love.  Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella is one of the great examples of the form in English.  The male speaker is enthralled by a beautiful, virtuous, cultured noblewoman who hardly knows he exists.  The record of his passion, full of obsession, idealization and self-loathing, not only gives us a window into this dimension of Elizabethan culture but also allows us to appreciate the nature of poetic craftsmanship. 

PRODUCER'S NOTE: This show was recorded during tornadic Oklahoma storms, but we persevered because literature matters that much to us here at Professing Literature. We had to cut a few times during recording to keep an eye on the weather, so please excuse any edits that aren't seamless. As always, thanks for listening!

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "Odonata" by Jakob Ahlbom

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John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” (Part Two).  Today we conclude our examination of Keats’ poem, looking at three pairs of stanzas that describe the strange courtship of Porphyro and Madeline and their escape from the castle.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "Careful Consideration" by John Bjork

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John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Part One).  The first of a two-part episode that considers John Keats’ gorgeous poem.  Set in a dreamy medieval world of castles, blood feuds and esoteric folk rituals, Keats gives us a love story with some of the lushest and most opulent imagery in all of English poetry.  However, we begin in a very different atmosphere marked by darkness, death and piercing cold.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "At Sea" by In This World

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On the day the Nazis invade Poland, beginning the Second World War, a poet nurses a drink in a New York bar.  The unwarlike Auden has just immigrated to the United States from England, yet he feels a shadow rising behind him in the east that no one will be able to escape.  Auden looks without and within, contemplating the primordial destructive urge that seems to be in control of the nations, the way modern life exacerbates it, and the only possible solution.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "les rues la nuit seul" by Renderings

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Flannery O’Connor, The Lame Shall Enter First.  Sheppard is a high-minded liberal.  Norton is his disappointing young son, who seems indifferent to Sheppard’s moral crusades.  In the opening paragraphs of this short story Flannery O’Connor presents the two of them at breakfast.  Every detail of the depiction alludes to just what is wrong within this little family, highlighting Sheppard’s “telescopic philanthropism” which neglects what is right in front of him as he attempts to prove his goodness and fails utterly.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Segment Music: "Steep Climb" by Martin Klem

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William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act Four, Scene Five.  Lear has lost his kingdom, his family, his security and his sanity.  When he encounters his old friend the Earl of Gloucester, who has been savagely blinded, we witness one of the strangest and yet richest conversations in all of literature.  Choked with both rage and guilt, Lear intercuts fantasies of revenge with flashes of moral clarity, and fumbles toward a profound articulation of what it means to suffer.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

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William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act One, Scene Four.  Looking forward to an easy retirement, where he can maintain the honours of kingship with none of the responsibilities, King Lear abdicates, and banishes the wrong daughter.  His loyal fool attempts to show him the error of his ways.

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Theme Music: "Nobility" by Wicked Cinema

Opening Passage Music: "Minuet in D Minor (BWV Anh. 132)" - Traditional

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