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

(post)script: Post-Gatsby

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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The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)

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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Containment and Play in “Jaws” (Part 2)

August 25, 2025 • 49 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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Containment and Play in “Jaws”

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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The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)

August 4, 2025 • 37 mins

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."

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The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”

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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Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)

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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Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

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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“The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats

June 30, 2025 • 37 mins

Wes & Erin discuss "The Indian to His Love."

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“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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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;}(post)script: Post-Gatsby

.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 American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)

Containment and Play in “Jaws” (Part 2)

Containment and Play in “Jaws”

The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)

The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”

Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)

Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

“The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats

“Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats

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)

Popular Podcasts

(post)script: Post-Gatsby

The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)