The Modern Essay and the Decline of Civilization

Episode 11 · January 5th, 2019 · 1 hr 48 mins

About this Episode

Park MacDougald joins Phil and Jake to discuss Virginia Woolf’s “The Modern Essay” and VS Naipaul’s “Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West.”

Works referenced:

Virginia Woolf, “The Modern Essay” “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-modern-essay-by-virginia-woolf-1690207
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf

Max Beerbohm, “A Relic,” “Laughter”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1956/1956-h/1956-h.htm#link2H_4_0001

Daniel Clowes
http://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/daniel-clowes/#/category/967

Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/an-elemental-thing/

Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/20086/kafka-was-the-rage-by-anatole-broyard/9780679781264/

Hegel, The Phenomenology Of Spirit, Terry Pinkard translation
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-the-phenomenology-of-spirit/6FEDB42FDEF2E5FF97FEAE0EEEDABE8E

woketoddler

Claas Relotius’ In Eigener Sache
https://magazin.spiegel.de/SP/2017/13/150231550/index.html

(For those interested in Relotius’ lies about Fergus Falls, this is from Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, residents of the town he fictionalized https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7)

Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374508043

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
http://people.duke.edu/~aparks/Spengler.html

Naipaul, The Writer and the World (essays mentioned: “Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West,” “A Second Visit,” “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” “Heavy Manners in Grenada,” “Our Universal Civilization”)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/119643/the-writer-and-the-world-by-v-s-naipaul-edited-with-an-introduction-by-pankaj-mishra/9780375707308/

Mario Vargas Llosa, “El Odio y El Amor”
https://elpais.com/diario/1991/12/30/opinion/694047611_850215.html

Naipaul, A Bend in the River
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/v-s-naipaul/a-bend-in-the-river/9780330522991

Naipaul, Guerrillas
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/v-s-naipaul/guerrillas/9780330522915

Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547786

Derek Walcott, Nobel Lecture: “The Antilles: Fragments Of Epic Memory”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/

Pablo Mukherjee, “Doomed to Smallness: Violence, VS Naipaul, and the Global South”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20479287

Anatole Broyard, “What the Cystoscope Said”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/20085/intoxicated-by-my-illness-by-anatole-broyard/9780449908341/

Lewis Thomas, “The Lives of a Cell”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535043/lives-of-a-cell-by-lewis-thomas/9780140047431/

Wesley Yang, “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho”
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-6/essays/face-seung-hui-cho/

Audio clips:

Excerpt from Kirsten Wever's Librivox recording of Max Beerbohm's "A Relic"
https://librivox.org/and-even-now-by-max-beerbohm/

Snowpiercer
https://youtu.be/3AIQdfW2Pds

Edward Said - A Critique of Naipaul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrcv3DbiIqQ