
Critical Readings
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.
Latest episodes

Dec 16, 2024 • 1h 26min
CR Episode 250: Julius Caesar, Act III
The panel discusses the play's self-awareness, its complexity of character, the presence of character flaws which serve to advance the action of the drama, and the contrast between reason and emotion, rhetoric and sophistry, and idealism and pragmatism.Continue reading

Dec 9, 2024 • 1h 5min
CR Episode 249: Julius Caesar, Act II
The panel discusses the the play's contrasts of public and private settings, its parallelism of scenes and characters (especially Calphurnia and Portia), and how Caesar's hubris, confidence, and superstition ultimately prove to bend the hinge of fate.Continue reading

Dec 2, 2024 • 1h 15min
CR Episode 248: Julius Caesar, Act I
The panel discusses the first act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with attention to Caesar's biographies, the fraught sociopolitical situation in Rome, the thread of ambition that runs through the play, and Cassius' crafty manipulation of Brutus.Continue reading

Nov 25, 2024 • 1h 6min
CR Episode 247: In Parenthesis, Part II
The panel discusses the biographical details of David Jones, and his participation in the Great War, before reading parts 5–7 of In Parenthesis, with attention to the role of mechanisation and the inversion of traditional forms of warfare and defence.Continue reading

Nov 18, 2024 • 1h 28min
CR Episode 246: In Parenthesis, Part I
The panel reads Parts 1–4 of David Jones' In Parenthesis, with attention to its Modernist and post-Romantic moves, its structure as a prose poem and its prose style, and its imagistic and impressionistic development of scenes and personal experiences.Continue reading

Nov 11, 2024 • 1h 34min
CR Episode 245: Wuthering Heights, Part IV
The panel discusses the conclusion of Wuthering Heights, with special attention given to the message of the novel; its place in the genres of Gothic, Romance, and Tragedy; and how its cycles of revenge and pain are eventually broken through acts of love.Continue reading

Nov 4, 2024 • 1h 33min
CR Episode 244: Wuthering Heights, Part III
Guest expert Dr. Madeline Potter joins the panel to discuss chapters 17–24, with a focus on the cycles of violence and manipulation at Wuthering Heights, the symmetry of relationships, and the re-embodiments of abuse perpetuated by Heathcliff.Continue reading

Oct 21, 2024 • 1h 17min
CR Episode 243: Wuthering Heights, Part II
The panel discusses chapters 10–16, from Catherine's marriage until her death, and examines Heathcliff's increased severity, the potential innocence of Isabella and Hareton, and the role that Nelly has played in escalating the fraught circumstances.Continue reading

Oct 14, 2024 • 1h 47min
CR Episode 242: Wuthering Heights, Part I
Dr. Madeline Potter joins the panel to discuss the opening chapters of Emily Brontë's only novel, with attention to the influences of the gothic and romanticism, and the narrative's depiction of the unstable tension between civilisation and nature.Continue reading

Oct 7, 2024 • 1h 2min
CR Episode 241: The Shimmering Form of Robert Penn Warren
The panel discusses the American Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren—the only person to win the Pulitzer prize both for Poetry and for Fiction—reading two of his poems from the November 1979 Poetry Magazine volume issued in honour of Allen Tate.Continue reading