Open Book

Examine Shakespeare's tragedy of love, jealousy, and manipulation. From Venice's political intricacy to Cyprus's contested shores, we analyse how Shakespeare intertwines personal drama with geopolitical conflict. Explore why *Othello* continues to engage audiences over 400 years after its premiere.

Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy, written around 1580 and published posthumously in 1595, is the first significant work of literary criticism in English. This episode explores Sidney's arguments for poetry's power to teach and delight, his concept of the poet as a creator of "golden worlds," and his assertion of poetry's superiority over other disciplines in moving readers to virtuous action.

NOTE: I say 1580 was “340 years ago,” but of course that’s off by a century. English professors evidently can’t do math.

For my complete read-through of The Defence of Poesy, start here.

Richard Wagamese’s 2014 novel Medicine Walk is the story of Franklin Starlight’s journey of mutual discovery with his dying father. It’s a novel about storytelling, and the personal and cultural identities that stories confer; but also about humans knowing their place on the land — a knowledge that goes beyond words and theories to experience, to embodiment rather than mental understanding.

Tom McCarthy’s C is a 2010 novel of ideas that addresses a wide array of scientific, historical, and cultural topics. Like McCarthy’s five other novels, it tells a complex and multi-layered story intertwined with disquisitions on art, memory, trauma, science, technology, and other mid-expanding topics. It’s written in a style that calls attention to its methods, surprising you recurrently with its perceptive and beautiful language.

An introduction to the major themes of Forster’s 1910 novel of modern life. It’s the story of two sisters, Helen and Margaret Schlegel, and their relationships with the Wilcox family, headed by its patriarch Henry Wilcox: a successful industrial capitalist, who has neither the Schlegels’ values of literature and art, nor sympathy for the lower classes of men like Leonard Bast, who aspires to those higher values.