Professing Literature

Emma, Vol 3, Chapter 7.  A bright summer day in Surrey offers a sharp contrast to emotional storms.  In this episode we discuss one of Jane Austen’s great set pieces, the picnic at Box Hill.  Emma gets herself into deep trouble when she embarrasses an old friend, and the man who secretly loves her has to summon up the courage to tell her she was wrong. 

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We started recording episodes about a year ago and are j...

Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking.”  Today we consider a lyric poem from Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney’s first collection (1966).  In “Blackberry-Picking” Heaney recounts a memory from his childhood, or perhaps from the beginning of his childhood’s end.

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We started recording episodes about a year ago and are just now releasing them. We have a handful more of them to publish before we catch up. We...

George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. The opening paragraphs of George Orwell’s novel seem innocuous, as a man named Winston Smith returns to his apartment building for lunch. However, from the first sentence onward Orwell estranges us from the world we take for granted and begins hinting at the nature of the totalitarian state which he feared might one day come into being.

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John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.”  In the early 1650s John Milton lost his eyesight.  Blindness forced him out of politics, where he had been an important figure in Oliver Cromwell’s government, and into retirement where he wrote some of the greatest poetry in all of literary history.  In this sonnet, though, he wonders if he has anything left to offer God at all. 

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J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 11.  Jane Gallagher had been the sort of girl who kept her kings in the back row.  Is she still?  As sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield unravels over the course of a few days in Manhattan his thoughts often return to Jane, who haunts his memory and is connected to so many of his most pressing obsessions:  sex, vulnerability, change and authenticity.  

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Beowulf.  A shining young warrior has crossed the water and saved the Danish people from a dreadful monster and his scarcely less dreadful mother.  As the Danes honour Beowulf with feasting, gifts and music their aged king offers him some counsel.  Hrothgar has ruled the Danes for fifty years, in times of triumph and adversity, and he wants to make sure his young friend can profit from his own hard-won wisdom. 

Professing...

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Part One).  This is the first of two episodes devoted to one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century, wherein Eliot’s enigmatic speaker invites us on an evening stroll through his memories, his fears and his inhibitions.  

We'd love to hear what you think about this episode or any of the others. Please send questions, comments, or otherwise to ProfessingLiterature@pr...

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Part Two).  The conclusion of our discussion of “Prufrock,” Eliot’s seminal exploration of modern alienation.  

Professing Literature is officially back! Thanks for your patience during our hiatus. We've got more episodes coming. Thanks so much for your support!

We'd love to hear what you think about this episode or any of the others. Please send questi...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act Four, Scene One. When four young aristocrats and a weaver spend a night in the forest outside of Athens they cross into the world of the faeries. The next morning they struggle to understand what happened.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Please reach out with questions, comments, or critiques to ProfessingLiterature@protonmail.com. We enjoy hearing from you!

David and Eric look back over the first series (episodes 1-10) of Professing Literature and David answers some listener questions. We got a great response from listeners and some great questions about episodes 1-10.

David also gives a few clues as to what's coming in the next series of episodes (Eric presses him on when there will be more Macbeth!).

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or otherwise...

St. Luke’s Gospel 8:40-56.  In this episode Professing Literature tackles the New Testament.  We discuss two intertwined miracle stories in Luke’s Gospel:  a healing and a resurrection.  Though the stories are short and seemingly simple Luke artfully deploys a handful of key details to help us understand the character of Jesus and the nature of his mission.

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Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter 12.  Late on a winter afternoon a young woman is walking from the country manor where she works toward the neighbouring village.  Jane Eyre has known great sadness.  She is poor and friendless but also strong and wise, possessed of high integrity and deep faith.  When she shortly encounters a strange man on horseback the meeting will change her, but it will change him even more.

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses.  Homer tells of how the mighty king of Ithaca arrived home after twenty years of war and wandering.  However, in Tennyson’s monologue, one of the best-loved poems of the nineteenth century, we hear that he is restless and longs for the companionship and adventure that had come to define him.

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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.

We love hearing from all of you. Please email us at ProfessingLiterature@protonmail.com.

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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 articul...

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 w...

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...

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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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.

We love hearing from all of you. Please email us at ProfessingLiterature@protonmail.com.

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