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
Mar 2, 2020 • 59min
CR Episode 35: Eliot’s Four Quartets III – The Dry Salvages
The panel examines 'The Dry Salvages' (rhymes with 'assuages'), the third of Eliot's Four Quartets, and ponders over the speaker's shift away from temporal considerations and towards intercessory prayer and overtly Christian theological symbolism.Continue reading
Feb 24, 2020 • 47min
CR Episode 34: Eliot’s Four Quartets II – East Coker
The panel examines 'East Coker', the second of Eliot's Four Quartets, with particular attention to the poet's developing understanding about the search for meaning in life, the connexion to ancestral history, and the necessity of identifying a telos.Continue reading
Feb 17, 2020 • 54min
CR Episode 33: Eliot’s Four Quartets I – Burnt Norton
The panel begins a four-week reading of T. S. Eilot's 'Four Quartets', beginning with 'Burnt Norton', and with particular attention to the ways in which the poem develops the ideas of the Eternal Present and the human experience of the passage of time.Continue reading
Feb 10, 2020 • 33min
CR Episode 32: Irish Poets II – Fallon, Kavanagh, Heaney
The panel concludes its two-week survey of Irish poets, ending with Peter Fallon's 'The Old Masters', Patrick Kavanagh's 'Address to an Old Wooden Gate', and Seamus Heaney's 'Fosterling'.Continue reading
Feb 3, 2020 • 51min
CR Episode 31: Irish Poets I – Allingham, Joyce, MacNeice
The panel begins a two-week survey reading Irish poets, beginning with William Allingham's 'The Fairies', James Joyce's 'A Prayer', and Louis MacNeice's 'Prayer before Birth'.Continue reading
Jan 27, 2020 • 39min
CR Episode 30: Fun in the Snow with Thomas Hardy
The panel reads three poems by Thomas Hardy (including some with an appropriately hibernal theme), discusses Hardy's role in contemporary literature, and plans some short story readings for the summer, along with one especially long poem.Continue reading
Jan 13, 2020 • 57min
CR Episode 29: Introduction to W. B. Yeats
The panel considers multiple, potentially competing, readings of three poems from the early, middle, and late work of W. B. Yeats, covering three of his poetic interests: faerie, Irish political events, and a longing for spiritual engagement.Continue reading
Jan 6, 2020 • 46min
CR Episode 28: W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues
The panel examines three poems by W. H. Auden, including his much-anthologised and potentially ironic 'Funeral Blues', the literary biography 'A Thanksgiving', and the seasonally-appropriate conclusion to 'For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio'.Continue reading
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
