Close Readings

• Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

  'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope Further reading in the LRB: John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1 David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2 Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

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• Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

  Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’ https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song Anne Carson, Nox https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.

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• Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

  Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror and trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠ Read more in the LRB: Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n03/claire-tomalin/scandal-s-hostages Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n02/caroline-gonda/ink-blots-pin-holes Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n09/marilyn-butler/versatile-monster Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/anne-barton/tousy-mousy Next episode: Chloe Aridjis on the short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.

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• Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

  What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world we experience is one of dynamic movement between revelation and concealment, where the essential nature of a thing lies in its ‘thinging’, and the ‘jug’s jug character consists in the poured gift of the jug’s pouring out’. In this episode Jonathan and James work through Heidegger’s ideas about both ‘things’ and time, and consider the purpose of his poetic style. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Richard Rorty: Heidegger's Worlds ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/richard-rorty/diary⁠ J.P. Stern: Heil Heidegger ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n08/j.p.-stern/heil-heidegger⁠ James Miller: Arendt and Heidegger ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/james-miller/thinking-without-a-banister LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠

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• Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

  The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come⁠ Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n10/dinah-birch/no-wonder-it-ached⁠ Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n03/rosemary-ashton/two-velvet-peaches⁠ Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: ⁠http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/gordon-haight/gordon-haight-s-speech-in-westminster-abbey-on-21-june-when-a-memorial-stone-to-george-eliot-was-unveiled⁠ Next episode: ‘Our Mutual Friend’ by Charles Dickens.

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