Transcripts are now created by Substack. You can access them by clicking the transcript icon just above this message.
The quality remains inconsistent. This is the BETA version of Substack transcription and promises to improve over time.
The prime advantage to the Substack transcripts over our previous provider is that they are synchronized with episode audio, so you can check the text against the recording simply by clicking on the play button to the left of each paragraph. I considered this feature imperative given that I have not been able to find time to edit transcriptions before they post.
My warning from previous posts remains applicable…
These transcriptions are computer-generated. Transcription software has been known to make basic errors, even confusing homonymic antonyms, like adequate and inadequate. While I hope such errors are rare, if you are going to quote from an episode of The American Vandal (which I encourage!), please review the associated recording (or have a colleague do so), as that is the proper source of record.
What is the political economy of New Criticism? Are the racist and reactionary Cold War politics of the New Critics immanent to their trademark method: close reading? The episode begins with the story of Langston Hughes testifying before the the House Un-American Activities Committee on what goes into the interpretation of a poem. What constitutes “tactical criticism” [9:00]? Critics try to rescue close reading from the “bad politics” at its origins [38:00], endorse supplementary methods [59:00], and describe how New Criticism looks from outside the U.S. and U.K. [1:07.30].
Cast (in order of appearance):
Andy Hines is the Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College and the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism & The University (U. Chicago, 2022).
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast. He’s also the author of “The End of Economics.”
Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Future of Decline (Stanford UP, 2022).
John Guillory is the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University and the author of Professing Criticism (U. Chicago, 2022).
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at University of Illinois, Chicago and the author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, forthcoming from Verso.
Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He was formerly Distinguished Professor of English at UC-Santa Barbara and President of the Modern Language Association. He’s the author (or co-author) of numerous books in Critical University Studies, most recently The Great Mistake (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and Metrics That Matter (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023).
Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston & Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of “The Humanities Are Worth Fighting For” and “Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist.”
