Grand Podcast Abyss

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Here we examine the intense paradoxes of the novel’s political debate between liberal humanism and Catholic communist totalitarianism; its sublime excursion into nature; its vision of civilization as sustained by sacrificial violence; its epiphanic exaltation of love over any one ideological position; its depiction of a major character’s death; its intimation of the persistence of secret societies and ancient mystery cults in modern politics and religion; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We further examine the novel’s philosophy of time; discuss its critique of Enlightenment progress and vision of cutting-edge technology (x-rays, cinema) as a paradoxically archaic, atavistic, and magical phenomenon; explore its Orientalism (especially as applied to Russia) and eroticism; consider its thesis on life as a sexual excitation and disease of matter; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We discuss Mann’s life, times, and other works; consider questions of translation; and introduce the novel’s themes of bourgeois reason and moderation vs. illness, sex, death, and the exotic, in terms both private and public, personal and political. We also elaborate on the novel’s modernist form, its enactment or performance of a temporal philosophy, despite its superficially traditional realism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Paradise by Toni Morrison, a neglected and most mysterious masterpiece. We consider the novel’s place in Morrison’s oeuvre as both capstone and reversal, and its mixed reception by its first critics as a too-baldly mythic betrayal of novelistic realism. Then we discuss the thematic place of gender, race, and religion in the complex narrative, encompassing how Morrison’s propensity for victim-blaming rescues the novel from didacticism; how her elusive portrayal of racial identity interrogates the reader’s own ideology of race; how the novel’s plot parodies and critiques the Exodus narrative at the fount of Abrahamic religion, American national myth, and the African-American freedom struggle; and how Paradise finally offers itself as the ambiguous, riddling scripture of the next faith, a syncretic gnostic-infused non-dualistic neo-Christianity presided over by a Black Madonna. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Names, usually considered Don DeLillo’s first major novel. We begin by placing DeLillo in the possible contexts of “theory fiction” and “Italian-American literature,” neither of which may exist, and then consider his biography. Then we discuss the several genres The Names makes use of (expatriate novel, political thriller, imperial romance, domestic novel) to embody its themes of American corporate imperialism, the postmodern condition, the relation between art and violence, and language as a spiritual force granting access to the numinous and divine. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the 10th in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. After discussing Nabokov’s eventful life and controversial opinions, we consider the novel’s experimental structure and send-up of scholarship, the implied metaphysics of the text, its treatment of key themes like beauty and pity, the ambiguous levels of reality the novel depicts, the nostalgia for Russia that may be at its basis, its potential ethic of sympathy, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the ninth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Herzog by Saul Bellow. We consider Bellow’s biography and the controversies occasioned by his use of his biography in his fiction, including recent allegations of domestic violence related to Herzog itself; we appreciate Bellow’s technical achievement in this latter-day modernist novel of ideas, its popular success, and pop-culture successors; we grapple with the novel’s portrayal of men and women, querying the source of its misogyny and masculine anxiety; we explore its portrayal of Jewish identity and class and cultural mobility; we articulate its philosophical argument about the nature of modernity, the legacy of Romanticism, and the failure of the radical and reactionary European intelligentsia from Herzog-Bellow’s humanistic American perspective; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is the eighth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. We discuss the several overlapping literary and philosophical traditions in which the book can be placed, i.e., the Great American Novel, European high modernism, the bildungsroman and picaresque, the novel of ideas, Existential fiction, and midcentury anti-totalitarian polemic, among others; we further consider the novel’s symbolic structure and combination of modernist formalism with popular cultural and mythic material; we elaborate on Ellison’s complex three-way association of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington-style “uplift,” and Marxist reductionism and totalitarianism, against the background of Ellison’s falling out with the left and the novel’s early Cold War context; we speculate on the novel’s anarchic individualism and affirmation of American democracy as pointing to the concerns of the New Left, on the one hand, and to those of the neoconservatives, on the other; we consider the objections raised to Ellison’s vision by the militants of the 1960s; we attempt to account for Ellison’s failure to produce another novel; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the eighth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. We consider the perennial relevance of the Gothic to American literature and society; Absalom, Absalom! as Great American Novel; the meaning of this novel’s “unreadable” style; its linear plot and this plot’s distortion through multiple storytellers; its revolutionary depictions of race and class, gender and sex, incest and miscegenation; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the seventh in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. We consider the novel’s reliance on ideas of decadence and degeneration; its portrayal of bohemia as aristocracy; its insistence on certain identities (Jewish, queer) as essentially modern qua deracinated heirs of a shattered tradition; its destabilization of human-animal, male-female, and other boundaries and binaries; its complex theory of gender and inversion; its borrowings from The Waste Land and Ulysses; the reception of the text by T. S. Eliot forward; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the sixth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. We consider the work’s hybrid genre, a mix of faux-autobiography, biography, and novel; the relationship between the aesthetic and the domestic as gendered spheres in a portrait of “wives” and “geniuses”; its expression of Stein’s theories of culture, nationality, literary history, and composition; and the disputed eminence of Stein, despite her centrality to modernism, from her own time, when even sympathetic critics called her unreadable, to the present, when she has been revealed to present another case of modernist fascism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fifth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Cane by Jean Toomer, an unclassifiable modernist masterpiece comprising prose, poetry, and drama, and the inaugural work of the Harlem Renaissance. First, I place Cane in its early-20th-century context of burgeoning African-American cultural consciousness as theorized by thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Then we consider Toomer’s life, with an emphasis on his spiritual questing and racial disaffiliation. Finally, we read the text of Cane itself: its unity-in-diversity, its titular metaphor combing beauty and violence, its tripartite structure joining Southern rural and Northern urban experience, its search in Southern culture for African roots, its interest in female interiority and the failure of love within and between races, its staging of the black intellectual’s alienation, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, which is free in its entirety, is the fourth in a sequence on the American novel. It concerns O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. We discuss Cather’s biography, critical reception, literary influences, claim to modernism, and overall genius; then we study the novel’s vision of mutual creation between people and land, its artistic vision of American ethnogenesis, its dueling visions of love, its complexities of gender and desire. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. We discuss the changing fortunes of Wharton’s literary reputation and status in the American canon in her lifetime and afterward and her theory of the novel as a synthesis of British social realism and French psychological realism. We assess The House of Mirth as a tragic study of one woman’s downfall as the aesthetic ornament of a declining aristocracy in an ever-more-more capitalist turn-of-the-century America. Ultimately, we survey the sometimes confusing co-existence in the novel’s vision of naturalism and Romanticism as Wharton negotiates the tumult of a changing society, at once sympathetic to an aristocratic transcendence of market society’s baseness and allured by capitalism’s ethic of risk and enterprise. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. We discuss the novel’s regionalist satire on provincial Christian America, its realist critique of Southern Romanticism, its Romantic idyll of the Mississippi, and its modernist use of vernacular and psychology. We contemplate the Book of Exodus as paradigm of American literature, Twain’s twist on Emersonian self-reliance, and his re-founding of a true Christian ethic outside of Christian civilization. Finally, we read four critics on the novel: T. S. Eliot on its mythic resonance, Ralph Ellison on its Romantic vision of blackness, Jane Smiley on its racist inferiority to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Toni Morrison on its modernist exposure of racism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns Henry James’s masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. We consider the following: Jane Campion’s film adaptation; James’s revisions of the 1881 text for the 1907 New York edition of his works; James’s Preface, with its theory of modernist interiority and female heroism; and the novel itself, with an emphasis on the fine moral distinction it draws between its aesthete-individualist heroes and aesthete-individualist villains. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns his two final works, the brief epic Paradise Regained and the closet tragedy Samson Agonistes. I describe both as Miltonic rewritings, though Classical forms, of the Biblical Book of Job, the former focused on Job’s temptation and the latter on his suffering. I also argue that the two final poems point in the opposite directions of Milton’s legacy: Paradise Regained toward the “home epic” of the realist novel culminating in Middlemarch, Samson Agonistes toward revolutionary poetry and romance culminating in Moby-Dick (until Joyce resynthesizes the realist novel and the revolutionary poem as Ulysses). The episode begins with a brief consideration of cinematic Christs. In conclusion, I characterize Milton’s critical reception from Samuel Johnson to C. S. Lewis, with a focus on Milton’s God by William Empson and its controversial case against Christianity tout court. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! Note that The Invisible College is on vacation next week before resuming with the modern American novel. The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns Books VII through XII of his epic poem Paradise Lost, with an emphasis sex and gender, the role of nature and the natural sciences, epic as a genre in relation to classical and Christian cultures, and the poem’s conception of Biblical and universal history. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns Books I through VI of his epic poem Paradise Lost and what I read as its radical rewriting of Christian metaphysics, a spiritual revolution extending far beyond the famously sympathetic portrait of Satan, one that places Milton closer to post-Christian figures like Goethe, Blake, and Joyce than has been generally recognized. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns his biography, historical context, and early achievement in three different genres: the masque Comus, the pastoral elegy Lycidas, and the prose polemic Areopagitica. The political paradoxes of his Puritanism and concern for liberty, and their implications for the present, and for his status as second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poetry, are considered throughout. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: