Episode 10: The Awakening

Explicit content warning

09/08/19 • 76 min

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

This week we read Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899). Chopin’s short work is about a tall lady who doesn’t want to listen to her husband (hetereosexuality! the best!), but she also doesn’t really want to do anything else either. We talk about bourgeois malaise, women’s suicide, atmospherics, and being a lady f*ckboy.

We read the Norton edition, edited by Margo Culley. While she doesn’t directly mention Chopin, we recommend Jacqueline Rose’s On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (2003) for her discussions of privacy, intimacy, and psychoanalytic approaches to literature.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Previous Episode

Episode 9: In Cold Blood

Slightly less snark than usual in this episode on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). Capote’s “non-fiction novel” (sure) is about the investigation of a 1959 murder of a family in Kansas and the trial and execution that followed. We discuss midcentury magazine culture and why The New Yorker sucks, how awful it must be to be a prodigy like Capote, and the fact that true crime is both the most fun and the most reactionary genre of them all.

We read the Vintage International edition. We mention it in the show, but it’s always a delight to read left culture critic and general middlebrow hater Dwight MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, rereleased in 2011 and edited by John Summers.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Next Episode

Episode 11: Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) may indeed be the “goofiest book that was ever written,” which is why it’s so fun to talk about! We get into all the nitty-gritty of Jonathan Swift’s scathing, sprawling, scatalogical satire -- its historical contexts, its politics that range from pretty good (empire is bad!) to terrible (it thinks women’s bodies are gross), and how its horses seem like they’re probably murderous eugenicists.

Also, just FYI for a certain kind of tankie -- satire need not be some self-indulgent bourgeois form of nonpolitics.

We read the Oxford edition edited by Claude Rawson with explanatory notes by Ian Higgins. For a transhistorical study that situates the concepts Gulliver is working through in the long history of European empire, we recommend Rawson’s God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.