The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, and featuring our fortnightly 'On Politics' podcast hosted by James Butler. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: [email protected]
Committed literature, as formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, demands that writers engage with political and social realities, yet this tradition faces significant challenges in an era lacking robust collective political vehicles. Lea Ypi, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics, argues that c...
The role of the intellectual has shifted from a legislative, moral authority to a fragmented, translation-based function within a technocratic society. Intellectual autonomy is increasingly compromised by the platform economy, where digital feedback loops and audience capture prioritize engagement over independent, cri...
Literary criticism functions as a vital practice for articulating the value of complex imaginative works, moving beyond mere economic or functional justifications. Helen Vendler’s career exemplifies this approach, as she championed "inhabiting the poem" to convey the pleasure of understanding lyric poetry. While her fo...
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities reimagines Marco Polo’s travels through a series of 55 fantastical, highly structured descriptions that serve as meditations on memory, desire, and the nature of urban existence. Rather than offering literal geography, the work employs a rigorous mathematical framework to explore how ev...
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady marks a pivotal shift in the author’s career, transitioning from the unselfconscious heroines of his earlier works to the complex, shimmering interiority of Isabel Archer. The narrative explores the collision between American self-reliance and the rigid social codes of Europe, where...
Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan functions as a "non-travel" narrative, utilizing the illusion of global movement to explore themes of stasis, boredom, and exile. The poem’s Ottava Rima structure, characterized by its challenging rhyming scheme, serves as a performative vehicle that enables Byron to blend high-minded sa...
Books 9 and 10 of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude document a transformative period in revolutionary France, marking the poet’s transition from a detached tourist to a committed republican. This narrative serves as a conversion story, where Wordsworth’s encounters with the aristocrat-turned-revolutionary Michel Beaupui...
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville functions less as a conventional travel narrative and more as a complex, fictionalized compendium of source material, serving as a "journey through a library" for 14th-century readers. Despite its dubious authorship and blend of verifiable cultural observations with complete fantasy, ...
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey reimagines Homer’s epic as a grand, technocratic spectacle, prioritizing themes of time and memory while omitting the poem’s focus on dialogue and complex female agency. Unlike the original text, which centers on stasis and the psychological weight of returning home, Nolan’s adaptation frame...
Follow this podcast in Podwise
Sign in to get AI summaries, transcripts and mind maps for any episode, including new ones.
