Épisodes

  • The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)

    The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (Part 2)
    Aug 4 2025
    Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."
    Voir plus Voir moins
    38 min
  • The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”

    The Door Slam Heard ‘Round the World: Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”
    Jul 29 2025
    Nora Helmer begins Act I as a devoted wife to her respectable husband, Torvald, and a devoted mother to her young children. She ends Act III by walking out on all of them and closing the door behind her. The emotional distance covered in these three acts (representing a span of just a few days in the lives of the Helmers) makes Nora one of the greatest and most coveted acting challenges in the theater. How might we mark out a route between the Nora of Act I, the charming toy of the men in her life who seems to desire nothing more than the comfort and ease her husband’s recent promotion is set to provide, and the Nora of Act III, an independent woman willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of her own self-determination? Wes & Erin discuss Henrik Ibsen’s "A Doll’s House."
    Voir plus Voir moins
    50 min
  • Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)

    Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (Part 2)
    Jul 14 2025
    What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
    Voir plus Voir moins
    48 min
  • Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

    Anti-Mystery in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”
    Jul 8 2025
    It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters’ struggle to make sense of what happened on the rock. Yet, sense is not what the film intends to deliver. Rather, it’s an anti-mystery that dismantles the nature of the mystery story itself—its love of solutions, its neat settling of the uncertainties that crime or menace introduce. What happens, this film asks, when an event resists the imposition of order, stands beyond the reach of logic or even language? Wes & Erin discuss “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”
    Voir plus Voir moins
    46 min
  • “The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats

    “The Indian to His Love” by William Butler Yeats
    Jun 30 2025
    Wes & Erin discuss "The Indian to His Love."
    Voir plus Voir moins
    38 min
  • “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats

    “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats
    Jun 23 2025
    Wes & Erin discuss "Leda and the Swan."
    Voir plus Voir moins
    54 min
  • The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)

    The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Part 2)
    Jun 16 2025
    Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium," and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    42 min
  • The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”

    The Artifice of Eternity in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”
    Jun 9 2025
    Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is potentially eternal. And yet the poem’s final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living, and only as alive as its audience. Wes & Erin discuss Yeats’s meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    42 min