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

“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats

June 23, 2025 • 53 mins

Wes & Erin discuss "Leda and the Swan."

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The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)

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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The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”

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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The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) – Part 2

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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The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)

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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“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 4

April 28, 2025 • 34 mins

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.

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“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 3

April 20, 2025 • 43 mins

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“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 2

April 7, 2025 • 38 mins

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“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson

March 30, 2025 • 52 mins

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...

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The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940) – Part 2

March 24, 2025 • 38 mins

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1940 Best Picture winner "Rebecca," starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

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The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940)

March 17, 2025 • 43 mins

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...

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Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Part 2)

February 17, 2025 • 39 mins

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.

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Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

February 11, 2025 • 46 mins

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, ...

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Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970) – Part 2

February 3, 2025 • 47 mins

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.

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Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970)

January 27, 2025 • 45 mins

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 ...

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Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” (Part 2)

January 20, 2025 • 50 mins

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.

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Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”

January 12, 2025 • 44 mins

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, ...

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Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) – Part 2

January 6, 2025 • 35 mins

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."

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Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)

December 29, 2024 • 41 mins

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...

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The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” (Part 2)

December 23, 2024 • 47 mins

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 ...

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Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)

The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”

The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) – Part 2

The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)

“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 4

“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 3

“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 2

“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson

The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940) – Part 2

The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940)

Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Part 2)

Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970) – Part 2

Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970)

Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” (Part 2)

Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”

Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) – Part 2

Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)

The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” (Part 2)

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“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats

The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)