Great American Novel
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...
Episodes
29 episodes
Episode 29: Rallying Around the Flag in Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
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 describ...
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Season 3
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Episode 29
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1:35:44
Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye
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 ge...
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Season 3
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Episode 28
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1:24:48
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE
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 eve...
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Episode 27
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1:14:34
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 26
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1:03:21
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
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...
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Episode 25
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1:08:20
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 24
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1:16:10
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
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...
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Episode 23
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1:25:48
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
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.&n...
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1:12:52
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
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 Lou...
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Season 2
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Episode 21
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1:06:23
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
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 t...
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Season 3
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Episode 20
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1:10:02
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow. Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, p...
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Season 3
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Episode 19
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1:03:40
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 18, our final Season 2 episode, we plunge ourselves into New Orleans of the fin de siècle in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier wrestles with a life she never chose, beset by...
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Season 2
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Episode 18
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52:21
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March is perhaps, of all the great American novels we've discussed, the one whose cultural imprint has faded the most. Even among Bellow fans this freewheeling exploration o...
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Episode 17
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1:03:25
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematica...
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Season 2
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Episode 16
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1:20:29
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary histor...
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Episode 15
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1:21:19
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West. ...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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1:40:30
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia
Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nat...
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Episode 13
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1:04:49
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematica...
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Season 2
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Episode 12
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1:28:51
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Our eleventh episode explores the most recent novel on our list of celebrated Great American Novels, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of Christian humanism, GILEAD. Set in a fictional small Iowa town in 1956, this de...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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1:24:57
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematica...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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1:31:50
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The A...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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1:22:01
Episode 8: Beloved and Ghosts of the Past, the Present, and Possibly the Future
The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematica...
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1:13:46
Episode 7–All that Jazz: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
In our seventh episode we explore a Great American Novel that's so ubiquitous it's almost hard to believe there was a time when the media wasn't full of contrast, random references to The Great Gatsby. The story of a mysterious millionaire who ...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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1:35:33
Episode 6: Watching the Horizon in THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematica...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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1:08:40
Episode 5: Blending Black and White in ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
William Faulkner's dizzyingly complex, Lost Cause-dismantling 1936 novel about the rise and fall of a Southern plantation owner who "outraged the land" amid the Civil War is perhaps the most formidable Great American Novel one can tackle: it ha...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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1:22:40