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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the seventh in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. We consider the novel’s reliance on ideas of decadence and degeneration; its portrayal of bohemia as aristocracy; its insistence on certain identities (Jewish, queer) as essentially modern qua deracinated heirs of a shattered tradition; its destabilization of human-animal, male-female, and other boundaries and binaries; its complex theory of gender and inversion; its borrowings from The Waste Land and Ulysses; the reception of the text by T. S. Eliot forward; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: