Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

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

If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedr...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1940 Best Picture winner "Rebecca," starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
Mark as Played
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beaut...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke's “You Who Never Arrived" and “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
Mark as Played
In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, ...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.
Mark as Played
It begins with the “stupidest song ever written,” as Robert Altman called it, and ends with a self-referential jab at the very idea of finding comic relief in the tragedy of war. But it is equally unserious, the film “M.A.S.H” seem to suggest, to take seriously the authority of war-making institutions, and their pretense to putting violence in service of an ideal. And so morality succumbs to mockery, love to hedonism, and military ...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.
Mark as Played
Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore’s preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, ...
Mark as Played
What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, "Sunset Boulevard."
Mark as Played
When the film starts, its two leads are already dead, more or less. Silent Screen legend Norma Desmond’s career is dead, and because she’s nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse, so, as the film’s narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it’s safe...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up ...
Mark as Played
Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a “swiftly tilting planet” that “bathes in a flame of space.” The sun is “far off in a shell of silence,” but its light decorates the walls o...
Mark as Played
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of “Beetlejuice,” and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities—rustic, gothic, and avant-garde—has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell ...
Mark as Played
Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious modernism of Delia Deetze, and her plan to remake it in her own image could turn their post-life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureacracy, or seeking the help of a ren...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin discuss Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me.” Thanks to our sponsor, the incredible online language school Lingoda. Save up to 50 percent on your language course by going to https://try.lingoda.com/Subtext50 and using code SUBTEXT50 at checkout. When you sing up for the seven day trial, you can attend three small group classes and one private class completely free!
Mark as Played
As an advisor to Henry VIII and ambassador to France and Italy, poet Thomas Wyatt was something of a professional court-surfer, practiced in riding the peaks and troughs of royal favor. Such were his verbal and diplomatic gifts that, though twice accused of and imprisoned for treason, he was twice released. His poetry reflects all the intrigue, paranoia, airlessness, and downright cruelty of the Tudor Court, where a misplaced word ...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1971 film "A New Leaf," written and directed by Elaine May.
Mark as Played
Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns something called a Montrazini—in short, he capitalizes fully on his inheritance, despite having little understanding of what “capital” actually is. The very ignorance of practicality that his wealth affords turns out to be his undoing, as soon finds that he’s run out of money and must bid go...
Mark as Played
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides' rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature. Thanks to our sponsor, the incredible online language school Lingoda. Go to https://try.lingoda.com/Subtext and use code SUBTEXT to save 20 EUR (or equivalent in your currency) when...
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

    Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob Pittman

    How do the smartest marketers and business entrepreneurs cut through the noise? And how do they manage to do it again and again? It's a combination of math—the strategy and analytics—and magic, the creative spark. Join iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman as he analyzes the Math and Magic of marketing—sitting down with today's most gifted disruptors and compelling storytellers.

    The Breakfast Club

    The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!