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
May 17, 2021 • 57min
CR Episode 78: Kipling, “If”, and The Great War
The panel discusses selections from the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, including his most famous poem, "If", and three poems related to The Great War and, its mechanised social aftermath: "Gethsemane", "The Benefactor", and "The Secret of the Machines".Continue reading
May 10, 2021 • 1h 3min
CR Episode 77: Ben Jonson’s Critical Eye
The panel discusses Ben Jonson's role as critic and author of the Elizabethan age, and reads four of his poems, including several of his Epigrams, before concluding with his rhapsodic ode written in memory of his friend, William Shakespeare.Continue reading
Apr 26, 2021 • 1h 25min
CR Episode 76: Excerpts from Leaves of Grass
The panel reads excerpts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, including poems from the inscriptions, Song of Myself, Children of Adam, and Calamus, considering the formal nature of the 'American Epic', and Whitman's use of individualism and universalism.Continue reading
Apr 19, 2021 • 1h 4min
CR Episode 75: Excerpts from Astrophil and Stella
The panel examines a selection of sonnets and a song from Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, considering the formal and tonal connexions between Sidney's poetry and the works of earlier and later poets, including Chaucer, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.Continue reading
Apr 12, 2021 • 54min
CR Episode 74: Introduction to Abraham Cowley
The panel discusses a selection of poems covering the entire span of Abraham Cowley's oeuvre: beginning with his college years and the unfinished epic 'Davideis', through his popular collections, and concluding with his late 'Ode to the Royal Society'.Continue reading
Apr 5, 2021 • 1h 4min
CR Episode 73: Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso
The panel discusses a selection of John Milton's shorter poems, the oft-paired 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', and examines their use of Orpheus as a metaphor, and their different attitudes to finding communal delight and solitary pleasure in life.Continue reading
Mar 29, 2021 • 1h 4min
CR Episode 72: Irony in the Poetry of Stephen Crane
The panel analyses the use of irony in the poetic works of Stephen Crane, including selections from "War Is Kind" (1899), and discusses the development of realism and imagism in English literature, especially in poetry about the experience of war.Continue reading
Mar 22, 2021 • 1h 5min
CR Episode 71: Accepting Complexity in Melville’s Poetry
The panel analyses contradiction in Melville's earliest and latest published poems: three selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War--his first collection--and "Art" from Timoleon and Other Ventures, published only four months before his death.Continue reading
Mar 15, 2021 • 1h 10min
CR Episode 70: Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard
In a return to the works of Alexander Pope, the panel reads his "Eloisa to Abelard" in full and discusses the complexity of Eloisa's tragic circumstances: her love for Abelard, her vocation as a nun, and the suffering to which they have been subjected.Continue reading
Mar 8, 2021 • 1h 12min
CR Episode 69: Keats and The Eve of St. Agnes
The panel discusses the late Romantic shift in focus from nominally Christian, deified Nature to transcendental beauty in three longer works by Keats, including "The Eve of St. Agnes" and excerpts from "Endymion" and the unfinished "Hyperion".Continue reading
