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Introducing Books Up Close: The Podcast
41 Plays4 months ago
In this trailer, hear Chris Lloyd introduce his new podcast, a spinoff of the Books Up Close YouTube channel. The first episode drops FEBRUARY 14. Please subscribe now and be ready for it.
Find the transcript and more about the show on Substack. Follow the show on Instagram.
Please leave feedback here.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Close Reading Essentials
Podcast Introduction
00:00:15
Speaker
collaborate on a close reading of their writing, look at a particular passage or a whole poem and talk about its meanings, resonances and the technicalities of language. This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors or anyone interested in how texts get made.
YouTube Channel Connection
00:00:33
Speaker
In this little trailer I'm going to introduce the podcast to you.
00:00:36
Speaker
You might have heard of Books Up Close before. I have a YouTube channel where I review what I'm reading. You can find a link to that in the show notes. If you're a subscriber over there already and you're following me into this spin-off project, thank you. If you're new to the channel or together, then welcome. Please do have a look at the videos and subscribe. I'll still be making those videos, don't worry, but this podcast will be a little bit different.
Understanding Texts and Contexts
00:00:59
Speaker
So in these episodes, I will be closely reading an author's work with them. So by close read, we mean that practice of being attentive to how a text is put together, how its linguistic and formal features work, what its effects are.
00:01:16
Speaker
As a literature teacher, I'm interested in how texts do what they do, so how the sentence structure or the tone or the use of imagery makes us feel and think things. It's really thinking about how a text works by looking closely at its constituent parts, but not losing sight of the wood for the trees, of course. The literary critic Paula Moyer says that close reading is our most powerful, discipline-specific tool that gives heightened attention to literary language and form.
00:01:43
Speaker
that, in her words, acknowledges the shaping force of culture and society. So by this she means that our close reading can't just focus on the language alone, as though the text emerged in a vacuum, but rather
Importance of Close Reading Today
00:01:56
Speaker
exists in context. It emerged in a particular place and time, and those are vital parts of the conversation. So why do I think close reading is important? Why start this podcast?
00:02:06
Speaker
Well, as the critic Robert Eagleston argues in his wonderful short book, Literature Why It Matters, close reading is as vital as ever. In a way, he says, the practice is just a more intensified version of what we, in his words, might normally do when we pay special attention to a piece of text. Think of how you might pour over a message, a tweet, a status update from someone you like. I love this quote. I'm guessing so many of you listeners have done close reading, whether you would call it that or not. You've thought endlessly about why someone you're dating used a small x instead of a large one at the end of a WhatsApp
Navigating Misinformation
00:02:43
Speaker
message.
00:02:43
Speaker
or why they used a laughing emoji, or why they didn't use capital letters or commas. We spent ages zooming into Instagram photos and seeing what's been included or cropped or mentioned. This is the world of close reading, where every little detail can yield, meaning, can be added together to form a more insightful picture of what we're looking at. In this context, though, of course, we're doing that with literary texts.
00:03:07
Speaker
And in our age of dis and misinformation, of unfettered social media oligarchs, of artificially generated text and image, insert a vomit emoji here, of ever decreasing levels of media literacy and the flooding of our environments with content,
00:03:24
Speaker
We need quieter and more careful practices of reading than ever, I think. And I'm not just talking about reading novels and poems. I'm thinking about how we read the world, how we read each other, our news sources, our politicians.
Authors in Discussion: A Debate
00:03:38
Speaker
It is more vital than ever for our politics, for our democracy, for our sanity, for our relationships, that we become better readers, more attentive readers. In other words, close readers.
00:03:48
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Although if you know any literary theory you might think that I'm breaking one rule of close reading by inviting authors onto the show to talk about their work. This is one proposed by the French critic Roland Barthes in his famous 1967 essay The Death of the Author. In this polemic Barthes argues that we must kill, symbolically of course, the author in order to fully grapple with a text.
00:04:09
Speaker
So long as we invest the author, capital A, with power, we are limiting the text he argues. We impose limits on it, or close the writing in his words. The striking last line of that essay is this. The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
00:04:27
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In other words, for readers to fully inhabit a text, to make sense of it, to read it proper, we have to get rid of the author and their potential intentions or desires or biographies.
Conversations with Authors
00:04:37
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This podcast doesn't refute Bart, I like his argument a lot, but I am interested in the conversations that can be generated with authors. Maybe we'll disagree about some of their lines and images, maybe we'll see little details differently, maybe authors will tell me that they didn't intend any of the things that I see.
00:04:53
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That's what I hope we'll be able to do, have interesting and thoughtful conversations with writers about their work. In so doing, I'll hopefully be shedding a bit of light for you on the act of writing. So if you're a writer yourself, published or yet to be, or a student or a teacher perhaps, or just someone interested in good books, you'll hopefully find the conversations interesting.
Community Engagement Call
00:05:13
Speaker
If this sounds good to you, please subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. Do it right now. Please share it with people, follow us on Instagram, at booksupclose, you can find me there too, and then subscribe to the substack where I'll be posting a fortnightly newsletter and then a post that has the episode show notes, the transcripts and any links from the things we've discussed.
00:05:37
Speaker
There's also a feedback form linked in the notes. If a particular episode strikes you, please do fill it out. Getting information about how these episodes are impacting you is really important for the project. That's all for now. We have some great guests coming up, so keep an eye on socials. Until the first episode, thanks for