Critical Readings
CriticalReadings.com
Critical Readings examines key literary texts using close reading and critical analysis, and explains these approaches in discussion. Listeners will learn about the texts themselves and about how to approach a text for critical analysis.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jan 16, 2023 • 57min
CR Episode 158: Introduction to Thomas Traherne
The panel reads three poems by Thomas Traherne, a late seventeenth-century English poet of imaginative, reflective, and speculative verse, whose manuscripts were discovered by happenstance and saved from the refuse pit in the late nineteenth century.Continue reading
Jan 9, 2023 • 1h 28min
CR Episode 157: Washington Irving’s Christmas
The panel reads Washington Irving's Christmas sequence from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., and examines how its portrayal of an old-fashioned, English Christmas served to influence attitudes towards the ideal of Christmas in the United States.Continue reading
Jan 2, 2023 • 1h 54min
CR Episode 156: The Lay of the Children of Hurin, Part III
The panel concludes a three-week reading of The Lay of the Children of Hurin, examining the connexion between the history, geography, and cosmology of Tolkien's imagined Middle-Earth and that of our own, very real, terrestrial middle-earth.Continue reading
Dec 26, 2022 • 1h 38min
CR Episode 155: The Lay of the Children of Hurin, Part II
The panel reads the second part of The Lay of the Children of Hurin, which relates the tale of Beleg Strongbow, and the doom of Turin Turambar, giving special attention to how the text connects to other mythological and Anglo-Saxon poems and narratives.Continue reading
Dec 19, 2022 • 1h 47min
CR Episode 154: The Lay of the Children of Hurin, Part I
The panel begins a three-week reading and analysis of the first version of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lay of the Children of Hurin", a poetic account of Turin Turambar, written between 1918 and 1925, and first published in The Lays of Beleriand (1985).Continue reading
Dec 12, 2022 • 1h 3min
CR Episode 153: Poetry of Delmore Schwartz
The panel examines three poems by Delmore Schwartz, with a particular focus on his language and themes, including a poetic biography of Lincoln, a metaphysical examination of Narcissus, and a portrayal of time as a frightening, existential inferno.Continue reading
Nov 28, 2022 • 1h 19min
CR Episode 152: Young Goodman Brown
In Critical Reading's first episode dedicated to a work of prose, the panel reads Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, Young Goodman Brown, and examines its allegorical structure, considering what it might suggest about both human nature and the modern era.Continue reading
Nov 21, 2022 • 1h 24min
CR Episode 151: Whitman and the Civil War, Part II
The panel concludes its series on American Civil War poetry with Whitman's Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, focusing in particular upon the structure, symbolism, and historical details of Whitman's three poems on the death of President Lincoln.Continue reading
Nov 14, 2022 • 1h 11min
CR Episode 150: Whitman and the Civil War, Part I
The panel reads a selection of the poems added to the 1860-61 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, focusing on what the poetry suggests about human nature, political life, and the people of the United States on the eve of the Civil War.Continue reading
Nov 7, 2022 • 1h 18min
CR Episode 149: Longfellow and the Civil War, Part II
The panel reads two poems from Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863): 'Torquemada' and 'The Birds of Killingworth', examining the role of zeal, dogma, and radical conduct in the poems, and what it may suggest about the war between the states.Continue reading
