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
Dec 30, 2019 • 53min
CR Episode 27: Longfellow’s Excelsior
The panel reads and surveys three poems by Longfellow: 'The Cross of Snow', 'The Day Is Done', and 'Excelsior', and makes a case for Longfellow's narrative and emotive expression, in contrast to modern critical demands for abstraction and complexity.Continue reading
Dec 16, 2019 • 53min
CR Episode 26: Emily Dickinson on Death
The panel looks at three poems by Dickinson (nos. 280, 311, and 712) which all centre on a theme of mortality and endings, and discusses their important relevance to modern life, with its focus on perpetual youth and its delusions of immortality.Continue reading
Dec 2, 2019 • 43min
CR Episode 25: Selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience
The panel examines four poems by William Blake from Songs of Innocence (Night, The Chimney Sweeper) and Songs of Experience (The Chimney Sweeper, A Poison Tree), and discusses Blake's mysticism, child-like wonder, and poetic depictions of Christianity.Continue reading
Nov 25, 2019 • 54min
CR Episode 24: Keats on a Grecian Urn and to a Nightingale
The panel examines 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' by Keats, focusing on the role of transience, mortality, stasis, truth, beauty, and nature--and imagining whether Keats frames his poems within an 'epistemology of aesthetics'.Continue reading
Nov 18, 2019 • 33min
CR Episode 23: Dante Gabriel Rosetti on Sleep
The panel discusses two 'sleep poems' of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "Sleepless Dreams" from The House of Life, and the early poem "My Sister's Sleep", with special attention, for composition purposes, given to the formal structure of the two poems.Continue reading
Nov 11, 2019 • 44min
CR Episode 22: Goblin Market
The panel begins a fortnight-long feature on the Rossettis with an examination of Christina Georgina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', including a reading of most of the poem with focus on the poem's elusive metaphors and multiple potential readings.Continue reading
Nov 4, 2019 • 60min
CR Episode 21: Christabel, Part II
The panel concludes their reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel" by considering the function of Leoline's overabundant grief, examining the nature of Geraldine's magical influence, and speculating about possible conclusions to the poem.Continue reading
Oct 28, 2019 • 1h 25min
CR Episode 20: Christabel, Part I
The panel welcomes James Smoker, a Coleridge scholar at the University of St. Andrews, to discuss Coleridge, Christian Theology, the British Romantics, and the first part of Christabel.Continue reading
Oct 21, 2019 • 48min
CR Episode 19: Coleridge’s Dream Poems
The panel discusses theological readings of three of Coleridge's most famous poems, all of which share the occasion of sleep as central to their action: 'Kubla Khan; or, the Vision in a Dream'; 'The Pains of Sleep'; and, 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison'.Continue reading
Oct 14, 2019 • 1h 12min
CR Episode 18: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part II
The panel discusses the second half of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with particular attention given to the theology of the Mariner's sin, contrition, and absolution, and the relation of that theology to and within the Romantic conception of Nature.Continue reading
