Liza Libes: How Marxist Theory Took Over Literature
KEY MOMENTS
0:00 – Intro — who is Liza Libes and what is Pens and Poison?
1:20 – Looking back on your 18-year-old writer self
2:51 – The teachers who made us writers — Brother Patterson and Poetry Friday
5:34 – Standing in the snow to understand Wallace Stevens — The Snowman read aloud
10:31 – The Lost Generation: Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot — and the fascism problem
13:03 – Shakespeare and Co., Paris, and missing Notre Dame before the fire
14:57 – Columbia's English Department: literary theory replaced literature
16:58 – Marxist literary theory, critical theory, and postcolonial studies explained
18:28 – Her parents escaped the Soviet Union — why she takes Marxism personally
19:28 – What literature used to be — humanistic inquiry vs. class consciousness
21:41 – Academia made literature esoteric — and publishing followed
23:01 – The DSA voter: overeducated, underpaid, and resentful
24:44 – Yesteryear — the trad wife novel, Anne Hathaway, and literary self-righteousness
26:03 – When the author's voice drowns out the character's voice
27:14 – Dostoevsky, Lionel Shriver, and characters the author disagrees with
30:23 – Writing outside your experience — her trans character, Lou's gay character
33:22 – Lou's story published alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Diaz
35:20 – Her new novel — exploring faith and Jewish theology
37:32 – Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot
39:03 – The Emily Wilson Odyssey translation — "a complicated man" vs. "cunning"
41:10 – What makes Odysseus great — the Cyclops, the cunning, the hubris
43:25 – Nolan's film: the Cyclops scene is gone — and why that ruins everything
45:42 – Greek hubris — Icarus, Arachne, and why pride destroys heroes
47:24 – The sirens scene: what it should have felt like vs. what Nolan did
48:30 – The overall verdict on Nolan's Odyssey — heroism is missing
49:46 – Outro — find Liza at Pens and Poison
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Writer and literary critic Liza Libes of Pens and Poison, whose parents escaped the Soviet Union, found that Columbia's English Department had swapped literature for Marxist theory. She joins Lou to talk about what happened to Columbia's English Department, why Marxism is an ideology of resentment, and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey cutting the Cyclops scene.
We also get into the teachers who made them both writers, reading Wallace Stevens's The Snowman out loud, the seventh grade class that made Liza stand in the snow for an hour, Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and the fascism problem, the novel Yesteryear, writing characters who disagree with you, and what "a complicated man" does to Odysseus in Emily Wilson's translation.