Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films
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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 lit...
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Freedom and Authority in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”
In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of...
(post)script: Post-Gatsby
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "The Great Gatsby"; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixin...
The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)
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,...
Containment and Play in “Jaws” (Part 2)
What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without bein...
Containment and Play in “Jaws”
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 confrontatio...
The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."
The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”
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 walkin...
Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)
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 th...
Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”
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 e...
“The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats
Wes & Erin discuss "The Indian to His Love."
The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium," and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should...
The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”
Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, an...
The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) – Part 2
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 r...
The Evil of Banality in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
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 en...
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 4
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on g...
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 3
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on g...
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 2
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on g...
“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson
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...
The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940) – Part 2
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1940 Best Picture winner "Rebecca," starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940)
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 l...
Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Part 2)
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...
Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
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 ever...
Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970) – Part 2
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 tha...
Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970)
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 r...
Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” (Part 2)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically...
Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa”
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...
Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) – Part 2
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 bet...
Word and Image in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)
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 mor...
The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” (Part 2)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an a...
The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin”
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 transfo...
The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988) (Part 2)
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of “Beetlejuice,” and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities—rustic, gothic, and av...
The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988)
Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious moderni...
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking in the Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Part 2)
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....
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking in the Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Part 1)
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 th...
Formal Meets Feral in “A New Leaf” (Elaine May, 1971) – Part 2
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1971 film "A New Leaf," written and directed by Elaine May.
Formal Meets Feral in “A New Leaf” (Elaine May, 1971) – Part 1
Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns somethi...
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 6)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides' rumination on the question of whether the...
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 5)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides' rumination on the question of whether the...
Love Dishonored in Euripides’ “Medea” (Part 4)
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides' rumination on the question of whether the...