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

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
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 2

April 7, 2025 • 38 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

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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