104: Little, Big
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…
103: Angel
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. Download this episode
102: Tristram Shandy
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….
101: The Dog of the South
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…
98: The Female Man
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…
97: The Time Machine
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…
95: The Way We Live Now
In a large bag, combine shady financiers, dissolute aristocrats and marriageable heiresses; spice with lower-class stereotypes and brash Americans to taste; add one improbable paragon of old-fashioned virtue; shake vigorously for 800 pages; serve with comic relish, sentimental syrup and…
94: Alien Hearts
What happens when the “modern woman” of the late 19th century takes a lead role in one of the oldest plots on the planet? How does social history finds its way into romantic psychology, and vice versa? The Sometime Seminar…
93: The Moonstone
Valuables vanish, comic/gothic stereotypes abound, the plot twists and the repressed returns as The Sometime Seminar discusses The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, which is by some accounts the first detective novel. Download this episode
92: Norstrilia
Whiz-bang pulp exuberance + witty, inventive style + just the right amount of psychological depth and moral/political seriousness = ???. The Sometime Seminar discusses the midcentury science-fiction stories of Cordwainer Smith, the best of which are selected — along with…
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