Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.  His reputation, however, only really advanced in the light of the atrocities of the Nazi regime.  Kafka was Jewish.  Like Orwell, Kafka's name has become synonymous with the type of world he portrays, in Kafka's case a world operating under an absurd series of conditions in which human freedom is rendered meaningless, and in which human nature becomes utterly dehumanized.

Paideia Today

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Nine, Kafka

Today's episode focuses on Flannery O'Connor (1925–64), an American writer famed for her 'southern Gothic' style.  We will read O'Connor as a Christian realist who portrays the depravity of the human condition with unusual acuity, set as it is in sharp relief against the backdrop of Southern gentility.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Eight, Flannery O'Connor

In today's episode of Paideia Today, we look at the famed British novelist George Orwell (1903-50), whose work is so harrowing the adjective Orwellian has come to describe the peculiarly modern form of totalitarian technocracy.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Seven, George Orwell

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.  We spend the majority of the episode looking at Yeats' most famous poem and observe the way it reflects the worldview of his era.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Six, W.B. Yeats

W.H. Auden (1907 –1973) is one of the great poets of the twentieth century.  Some regard him as a lesser poet to Yeats and Eliot - we discuss that here -  but he was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects.  Unlike Eliot, who migrated from America to Britain, Auden did the opposite.  His reputation grew after his death as well, which is usually a good sign of merit.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Five, W.H. Auden

T.S. Eliot has been embraced as a great poet on both sides of the Atlantic.  Born in the United States, Eliot emigrated to England and remained there.  He became the key figure of the Modernist movement.  We discuss Eliot's poetry as well as the movement itself in this week's episode.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Four, T.S. Eliot

Joseph Conrad is an extraordinary figure, not least because he wrote his novels in his second language.  His novella Heart of Darkness is justly famous for its depiction of the evil of the human heart in the context of the 'scramble for Africa'.  It has been variously described as a 'colonialist' and a 'postcolonialist' novella. While there is no dispute that the expansion of the European powers into Africa is its contemporary context, and there is a critique of colonialism in the text, we dismiss it as reductive to see Conrad's work solely in that light.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Three, Conrad

Episode 2 of Season four again sets the foundation for the Modernist movement, looking at the two superb poetic craftsman, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman.  What is noteworthy about the two, besides their aesthetic excellence, is the way they capture a fin-de-siecle cultural despair and express its pervasive sense of alienation.  While the First World War will devastate much of Western Christendom, it is important to note that the dissonant notes to the leitmotif of social progress are already being sounded by these two important poets.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode Two, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman

Season 4 of Paideia Today begins with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde.  Wilde initiates literary modernism, which in turn sows the seeds of a sort of postmodernism rarely discussed by those tracing the history of ideas.    It is vital, however, because it connects the pursuit of a rather ugly 'aesthetics' movement with an assault on goodness and truth.  Goodness, beauty, and truth have been seen to be connected since the ancient world.  But in literary modernism, we see the doctrinal severance of beauty from notions of morality and truth.  Horaces's dictum for the poet was 'to teach and to delight'.  Wilde's pursuit of delight, however, is presented in an amoral fashion (in keeping with the fashionable agnosticism of his era).  It is no accident that the twentieth century was marked by what C.S. Lewis described as 'the Abolition of Man', but also by a total departure from the educational aims of the world prior to then, in pursuit of a transhumanist and often posthumanist ideal.

Paideia Today, Season Four, Episode One, Wilde

For the conclusion of season 3 of Paideia Today we look at the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.  Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, engages with the modern alienation from life that progressive ideology and commitment to material advances.  Rather than one of Tolstoy's magisterial novels like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, we look at his brilliant novella, which addresses themes concerning wisdom and virtue, themes often very much ignored in fiction thereafter.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episdoe Fourteen, Tolstoy

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment catalogues the life of a young political idealist who commits two murders to fulfill his ambition.  It is an exceptionally subtle and complex narrative, which not only leans on elements of Dostoevsky's own biography, but situates them within a Christian framework of guilt and redemption.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episode Thirteen, Dostoevsky

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and until recently was one of the most popular British poets.  But he has been seriously neglected in recent years.  In this episode of Paideia Today, we discuss his most important poem.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episode Twelve, Tennyson

Today's episode of Paideia Today looks at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  This fascinating novel represents an amalgamation of various strands of the novel tradition, but arguably begins a new one, that of science fiction.  In the process, Shelley also begins a prescient critique of the transhumanist impulse of the modern scientist, or modern Prometheus, as she calls him, and his abandonment of the ethics of love in pursuit of allegedly humanitarian progress.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episode Eleven, Mary Shelly

Jane Austen is without doubt one of the finest prose stylists and keenest observers of human nature.    We discuss Austen as a novelist in the light of that eighteenth century genre, noting that her clear satire is what marks her as a great moral writer.  The focus of our discussion is her splendid novel Pride and Prejudice, a masterpiece in tracing the lineaments of fallen humanity, and the proud flaws of even its most admirable characters, here represented in the characters of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episode Ten, Jane Austen

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with giving the definitive take on the imagination, the faculty all the Romantics claim marks their distinctive poetic experiment.  But is Coleridge's definition actually more a critique of Romantic poetics than an expression of it?  This episode begins by discussing his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but ranges to discuss a broad array of topics.

Paideia Today, Season Three, Episode Nine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Paideia Today is a podcast in which Dr. Scott Masson and Dr. Bill Friesen, professors of English, discuss the great works of western literature. We do so from a now largely lost classical perspective, attempting to illustrate why 2800 years of the greatest thinkers valued these works above all others as keys to understanding the human condition.

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Paideia Today

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