Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films
Subtext is a book club podcast for readers interested in what the greatest works of the human imagination say about life’s big questions. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh conduct a close reading of a text or film and co-write an audio essay about it in real time. It’s literary analysis, but in the best sense: we try not overly stuffy and pedantic, but rather focus on unearthing what’s most compelling about great books and movies, and how it is they can touch our lives in such a significant way.
Episodes
November 3, 2025 • 45 mins
What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”
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October 26, 2025 • 51 mins
The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results...
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October 13, 2025 • 47 mins
What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film "There Will Be Blood."
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October 7, 2025 • 49 mins
The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title....
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September 22, 2025 • 50 mins
In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in con...
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September 15, 2025 • 49 mins
In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in con...
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September 8, 2025 • 13 mins
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "The Great Gatsby"; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixing of the 1919 World Series; Fitzgerald's neighbors on Long Island, including Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn; the contemporary feel of the novel; the NYC movie-making scene in the early 20th century; Marilynne Robinson; and possibilities for the next episode, where because of a weird time wa...
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September 2, 2025 • 83 mins
We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the Jazz Age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of a terrible world war; the liberating promise of newly ubiquitous technologies, including electricity, the telephone, and the automobile; and a certain image of success as carefree, inexhaustibly gratifying, and ava...
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August 25, 2025 • 50 mins
What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.”
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August 18, 2025 • 47 mins
We’re never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community, despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water, and the shark that inhabits it, have a fateful character that seems to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the “exact kind of splashing” human beings produce when at play in the water, and Martin h...
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August 4, 2025 • 37 mins
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."
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July 29, 2025 • 49 mins
Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route...
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July 14, 2025 • 48 mins
What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
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July 7, 2025 • 46 mins
It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remain...
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June 30, 2025 • 37 mins
Wes & Erin discuss "The Indian to His Love."
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June 23, 2025 • 53 mins
Wes & Erin discuss "Leda and the Swan."
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June 16, 2025 • 41 mins
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium," and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
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June 9, 2025 • 41 mins
Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always...
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May 26, 2025 • 38 mins
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.
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May 18, 2025 • 42 mins
On the surface, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the Devil. In the end, it seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition, and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Wes & Erin discuss Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satan...
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