Great American Novel

Aug 11 2024 29 ep. 76 mins 10

Great American Novel Podcast artwork

Few literary terms are more hotly debated, discounted, or derided than the "Great American Novel." But while critics routinely dismiss the phrase as at best hype and as at worst exclusionary, the belief that a national literature commensurate with both the scope and the contradictions of being American persists. In this podcast Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt examine totemic works such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Toni Morrison's Beloved that have been labeled GANs, exploring their themes, forms, and reception histories, asking why, when, and how they entered the literary canon. Readers beware: there be spoilers here, and other hijinks ensue...

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Episode 29: Rallying Around the Flag in Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

Aug 11 2024 95 mins

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the

Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye

May 30 2024 84 mins

The Great American Novel Podcast episode 28 considers JD Salinger’s landmark 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. Your hosts discuss Salinger’s famous reclusiveness, the book’s continuing appeal, and its influence on both the genre of so-called “young adult literature” and post-breakdown lit. We examine the novel in its role of the creation of the American teenager as a

Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE

Apr 21 2024 74 mins

Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supermarket is the s

Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Mar 07 2024 63 mins

The 26th episode of the Great American Novel Podcast delves into Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Published when the author was only 23, the novel tells the tale of a variety of misfits who don’t seem to belong in their small milltown in depression-era, 1930s Georgia. Tackling race, disability, sexuality, classism, socialism, the novel catapulted

Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Jan 13 2024 68 mins

Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story of an independence-minded young w

Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion

Nov 03 2023 76 mins

Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while. In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, the Mamas and the Papas and Lloy

Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING

Oct 07 2023 85 mins

William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author his early reputation for sadisticall

Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

Aug 07 2023 72 mins

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 22, we wrestle with the old Thoreau quote "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation" as we delve into the soul-sapping mid-century suburbs in Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. Join the hosts for a conversation that considers other suburban chroniclers such as Updike and Cheever and other treatments from the film adaptat

Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING

Jun 03 2023 66 mins

Only thirty years old this year, Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is a powerful testament to social justice and to the search for individual dignity in an oppressive legal system. Set in the late 1940s in a small Louisiana community, the book tells the story of two men, one a convicted murderer on death's row (Jefferson) and the other his reluctant tutor (Grant) who i

Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING

Apr 12 2023 70 mins

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 20, your fearless (or is it feckless) hosts find themselves in the damp swamps and thick scrublands of north central Florida in the post-Reconstruction era as we struggle to survive with the settlers of the brush country in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel, The Yearling. We discuss how this Maryland native came to w