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An episode recorded as part of the Modes of Reading Today Symposium, hosted by the Townsend Center For The Humanities begins with a discussion of John Donne’s insomnia and Wilfred Bion’s undigested nightmares, followed by a vigorous discussion of attention, sleep, and immersion as they relate to literature and criticism [39:00], after which the symposium’s organizer (and host of the Psychoanaliterature podcast) flips the studio for some analysis of The American Vandal’s creator [90:00].
Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, David Marno, Yael Segalovitz, Jonathan Kramnick, Toril Moi, Emma Lieber, Nicholas Baer, Dora Zhang, Anne-Lise François, Farah Bakaari, Sina Dell’Anno
Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026
Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby, L. D. Miller
Featured Guests
David Marno is Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley and the author of Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (U Chicago, 2016).
Yael Segalovitz is the Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley and the author of How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024). She is also the co-host, with Emma Lieber, of the Psychoanaliterature podcast.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
Episode Bibliography
Dave Bangert, “A Playlist & Portrait of Don Seybold, A Jazz Champion For Lafayette” Based In Lafayette (December 7, 2025)
Dave Bangert, “Tony Zamora, Longtime Purdue BCC Director & Lafayette Jazz Legend, Remembered As More Than ‘That Damn Good Musician’” Journal & Courier (July 3, 2020)
Wilfred Bion, Learning From Experience (1962)
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism & The Ends of Sleep (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)
John Donne, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” (1624)
Ofra Eshel, “Whose Sleep Is It, Anyway? Or ‘Night Moves’” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Summer 2008)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
John Guillory, On Close Reading (U Chicago, 2025)
Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism & Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (U Chicago, 2023)
David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (U Chicago, 2016)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals (1992)
Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection” Yale Review (March 1964)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day [Morgenrothe] (1881)
Yael Segalovitz, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024)
Yael Segalovitz, “Probably Not Book Learning At All’: The Gender of Attentive Reading in Woolf & Lispector” Poetics Today (March 2026)
Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is A Conversation” The American Vandal (February 18, 2026)
Matt Seybold et al, “Close Reading Is Not A Luxury” The American Vandal (March 18, 2026)
Matt Seybold et al, “The Racist Interpretation Complex” The American Vandal (August 28, 2023)
Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant (Ed.) Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025)
Donald Winnicott, “The Capacity To Be Alone” (1958)
Event Copy
