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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We consider Hardy’s unique status as great novelist and great poet and his role as transitional figure between Victorian and modernist; we discuss common criticisms of his fiction, rehearse his biography, and broach his views on literature. Then we examine the contradictory views of nature and society offered by his most famous novel, paying special attention to the mythic roots of his modern tragedy, or his reinvention of the ancient rite of tragedy to renew its purpose in modern times. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We consider the novel’s mix of Gothic romance with social realism, its invitation to a psychological reading and projection of the psyche onto exteriors and landscapes, its allegorical and Christian quality, its nostalgia for the Romantic era, its political implications for questions of gender and empire and class, its changing reputation in modern criticism, and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. We discuss the collective biography of the Brontë family up until Emily and Anne’s death, then we consider the novel’s beginning in the mode of Gothic romance and ending in that of domestic realism, its intricate structure and nested narrators, the combination of social and metaphysical meanings the narrative may hold, Brontë’s dialogue with the Romantic tradition and with Milton, interpretations of the novel offered by prominent critics (Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy Armstrong, Camille Paglia), and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We consider the novel’s context in Shelley’s biography and milieu; its criticism of revolutionary politics, sublime aesthetics, and overweening science; the connection it draws between magic and science; its intricate, complex structure; its roots in Greek myth and Christian religion; its inception of the science fiction genre, as well as its participation in epic, tragic, Gothic, sentimental, and domestic genres; the differences between the 1818 and 1831 texts; the possibility that Mary Shelley is a neglected figure in the tradition of conservative literature; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow for to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode on Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is free in its entirety. We discuss Bolaño’s romanticism and anarchism, his descent from Troubadours and American novelists, his polemics on Latin American literature, his attempt to create a truly revolutionary art, love, and politics inassimilable to totalizing institutions, his cosmic or gnostic dimension, and much more. Please enjoy! Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Gabriel García Márquez’s monumental novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We discuss the novel’s artistic and historical significance, the nature and legacy of magical realism, and the author’s own life and controversial political involvements. Then we investigate the novel’s intensely intricate plot, its themes of time (circular or linear), the limits of politics, and the meaning of incest, its movement among wildly divergent genres (epic, tragedy, utopia, family saga, shaggy-dog joke), its significance as a microcosm of the Latin American and Caribbean experience as metaphors for the human condition, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 30 minutes are free, is about Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. I begin first with my checkered personal experience with Lispector’s writing, then the three phases of her reputation among Anglophone readers, and finally her biography. Then I embark on an explication of the novel, which I interpret as no less than an attempt to create a new religion, a new ritual, and a new gospel in the middle of the 20th century, a fusion of heaven and hell, matter and spirit, good and evil, like none seen before, equal parts disturbing and profound. Several ongoing themes of The Invisible College gather to their shattering climax here. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Anne Carson’s classic novel in verse Autobiography of Red. We discuss Carson’s evolving reputation from avant-garde to popular writer, her renegade classicists’ theorization of love, poetry, and the novel in her early treatise Eros the Bittersweet, and her narrative of a gay male artist’s romantic coming of age amid poetic language’s attempt to set being free in Autobiography of Red. Along the way, we query the political in Carson’s work, translator Emily Wilson’s recent critique of Carson, the meaning of cross-gendered gay romances written by straight authors, the potential of the verse novel as a genre, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. First we consider Bishop as “poets’ poets’ poet” (John Ashbery) vs. “almost a novelist” (John Hollander) in her perfectionism, variety, humor, restraint, and outward-focus, and compare her to contemporaries like her friend Robert Lowell. Then we map her biography according to the places she lived: Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Key West, Brazil, and more. Then we survey her poems of Brazil, with their suspended identification between native and colonizer, and their potential for visionary initiation; her prose piece “In the Village” recalling her childhood in Nova Scotia caught between her mother’s formless scream and the blacksmith’s form-giving art; her poem “Sandpiper” and its tribute to or quarrel with William Blake; the multiple identifications inspired by her recounted childhood experience “In the Waiting Room”; her wry self-portraits as a retired “Crusoe in England” and object of colonial surveillance in “Twelve O’Clock News”; and finally the ultimate synthesis of formal constraint and formless passion in the villanelle “One Art.” Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Susan Sontag’s In America. Most of the episode concerns the aesthetic, political, and personal peregrinations of Sontag’s “exemplary” 20th-century life: her changing beliefs about American culture and American power and her move from radicalism to liberalism; her concomitant abandonment of aesthetic extremism in favor of a more measured novelistic humanism; her thoughts about the conflict between the intellectual and the artist, the essay and the novelist; and more. Then we measure her final novel, In America, against these ideas and against her own high ambitions. Whether you’ve read In America or not, this episode should serve as a thorough and entertaining introduction to the one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall; I have also included, as a bonus, the slideshow for my earlier lecture on Sontag as mentioned in the episode:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Gore Vidal’s revisionist historical novel of the American founding, Burr. Aesthetically, we consider Vidal as icon and iconoclastic literary dissident, his alienation from the Romantic aesthetics of the traditional American novel, the limits of historical fiction as a genre, and Burr’s status as a neo-18th-century novel. Politically, we discuss Vidal’s ambivalence about the United States as a polity, his debunking presentation of historical figures like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and his ambiguous relation to questions of democracy, immigration, class, and the state. Finally and philosophically, we link Burr, for all that it is ostensibly a middlebrow historical novel, to the sexual antinomianism or queer nihilism of Vidal’s more vanguardist fictional efforts like The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (The Invisible College covered the first volume, Swann’s Way, in an episode last year.) We consider Proust’s complex reflections on art and artistic genius, his ambivalent portrayal of Jewish and queer characters as outsiders akin to the artist, his ironic survey of the meeting between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, his aesthete’s skepticism about both friendship and sexual desire as against art, his discomfiting tribute to the eros of adolescence, his gentle oscillation between demystifying and mythifying aesthetic modes, and much more. Please like, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Émile Zola’s Nana. We first discuss Zola’s life and influence on the French model of the activist writer-intellectual as well as his naturalism and scientific theory of the “experimental” novel. Then we test these ideas against his classic novel of an actress-courtesan’s rise in the corrupt society of Second Empire France, a novel aesthetically and politically divided between its naturalist commitment to showing the determinations of heredity and milieu, on the one hand, and, on the other, its conspicuous myth-making of the modern woman as world-devourer. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Honoré de Balzac’s most famous novel, Père Goriot, exemplary of his pioneering realist style, and his novella Sarrasine, exemplary of his more decadent tale-telling vein. We first consider the eccentric and prodigious Balzac’s life and times and his ambition to write a Human Comedy. Then we explore Père Goriot’s portrayal of the modern city as labyrinth, its conflicts between the rival quests for love and power, its interest in crime and cynicism and cruelty, and its contest between realistic-scientific and allegorical-religious modes of literary representation. Next we turn to Sarrasine’s sensationalist tale of an sculptor in erotic pursuit of an ideally beautiful singer who isn’t what she seems. Finally, we dwell on the commentary Sarrasine occasioned by Roland Barthes, for whom it exemplified the ruse of Balzacian realism, and Camille Paglia, for whom it demonstrated Balzac’s commitment to androgyny and artistic production rather than the gender binary and sexual reproduction, Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about George Sand’s novel Indiana. We discuss Sand—the most popular European novelist in her time—as exemplary of the fate of Romantic, idealist, popular, and women’s fiction after the later 19th- and early 20th-century dominance of realism, naturalism, and modernism. We consider Sand’s androgyny, progressivism, and feminism, and her reception by Anglophone writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. We explore Indiana as a novel in which realism and romance battle for aesthetic hegemony. We examine its place in the French politics of its time—the end of the Bourbon Restoration—and its own ideologies of gender, empire, nation, race, and class. We finally weigh the continued viability of the aesthetics of romance and idealism today. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: