The Modern Essay and the Decline of Civilization

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