What’s everyday life, and what isn’t? What’s the critique of everyday life, and what is it good for? What’s unorthodox Marxism, and what’s just…sociology?
The Sometime Seminar discusses the first two volumes of The Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre. (Vol. 3 will be discussed in the next episode.)
Dreamily plotless tales of journeys through fantastical lands? Amiably formulaic stories to tell in your London club over copious brandy? Get you an aristocratic dilettante who can do both.
The Sometime Seminar discusses the fantastical, and later not-so-fantastical, short fiction of Lord Dunsany, as collected in In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales.
Supplemental links: Ursula K. LeGuin’s review of the collection; Laura Miller reviews Dunsany’s career for The New Yorker
What happens if you sprinkle late-19th-century-British fairy dust all over 20th-century upstate New York? What do you call it when a multi-generational family saga and a sweeping fate-of-the-world fantasy novel collide with 70s-style quote-unquote postmodernism? How many layers of meta-narrative reflection are you on?
The Sometime Seminar discusses Little, Big (1981) by John Crowley.
It’s a fine-tuned realist novel…about an author of extravagant romantic novels. It’s middlebrow fiction…but extremely good. It’s Elizabeth Taylor…but not that Elizabeth Taylor.
The Sometime Seminar discusses Angel (1957) by Elizabeth Taylor.
Plans go awry, digressions abound and hobbyhorses gallop in all directions as The Sometime Seminar discusses Laurence Sterne’s seriously unserious comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767).
Supplemental links: Sigurd Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity” (ELH, Mar. 1961); Viktor Shklovsky’s “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy“ (from Theory of Prose)
How many digressions can you dangle from a road-novel quest plot? How many varieties of crank and con-artist can you fit in a Buick Special? How much hilarity can you wring from the masterfully rendered voice of an insufferable American blowhard? (A lot!)
The Sometime Seminar discusses The Dog of the South (1979) by Charles Portis.
Swords, sorcery, and semiotics! In our ninety-ninth episode, The Sometime Seminar discusses Samuel R. Delany’s masterful Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), a collection of fantasy stories unlike any other.
A withering satire, a feminist utopia, a work of rigorous science fiction and a high-spirited postmodern genre-buster…all for the price of one book!
The Sometime Seminar discusses The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ.
Note on e-texts: All available electronic editions of this book seem to be terrible. We’d strongly recommend reading it on paper.
How much cosmic imagination and speculative social history can fit in a pulp-adventure framework? Why do science fiction and modernism emerge at the same literary-historical moment? Does the future belong to giant crabs?
The Sometime Seminar discusses the work of H.G. Wells, with a focus on The Time Machine (1895).
Supplemental links: on the complex textual history of the story; the SF Encyclopedia entry on “Wells’s Law”
Note on e-texts: the Project Gutenberg text, on which most free e-texts of The Time Machine are based, is corrupt and error-ridden. We recommend instead the Penguin Classics edition, which comes with an excellent introduction by Marina Warner.
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