Episode 12: The Fall of the House of Usher

Explicit content warning

09/22/19 • 77 min

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

If you're trying to decide whether to reconnect with your creepy old childhood friend who lives in a fungus covered mansion deep in the woods with a secret twin sister, this episode is for you!* We're talking about “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is goth icon Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story about twincest. We dig into the uncanny, phrenology, family trees, and olde timey doctoring...and while we were digging we just may have found someone buried alive under these many layers of nineteenth-century degeneracy and weirdness! Hey, we all make mistakes.

If you want to read up on Freud's uncanny, his 1919 work The Uncanny is the perfect place to start. For more about the uncanny in American literature, check out American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy.

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

*Note: do not, under any circumstances, rekindle any friendship. Friendship is unnecessary. That is why you have podcasts.

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

*Note: do not, under any circumstances, rekindle any friendship. Friendship is unnecessary. That is why you have podcasts.

Previous 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.

Next Episode

Episode 13: Heart of Darkness

We follow one of literature’s least-impressive boats up the Belgian Congo in our discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). It’s yet another magazine novella, this time about how our “hero” Charles Marlow journeys up the Congo seeing some truly horrifying effects of European colonialism, and how he encounters the ivory trader and Big Thoughts Guy Kurtz. We talk about empire, space, doubling, gender, and Marlon Brando.

We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Paul B. Armstrong. Although it certainly shows its years, it’s always illuminating to read Edward Said’s “Two Visions in ‘Heart of Darkness’” from Culture and Imperialism.

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.