54 min listen
S1E12: We Care About Everyone with William Flesch
S1E12: We Care About Everyone with William Flesch
ratings:
Length:
64 minutes
Released:
Mar 26, 2012
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss José Saramago's way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don't; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke's scary Funny Games viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke's ludicrous Funny Games viewed at home; what's so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your viliains, as with Hitler in Max and The Boys from Brazil; the perfect biological pitching of Onion's 9/11 headline "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell"; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray so gripping; our desire to feel we've misjudged characters; Buffy, Angel, and our bets about liking them; and characterization and reversion to type all the way from Shylock to Stewie Griffin.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.
Released:
Mar 26, 2012
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
On 20 years of The Closing of the American Mind with Roger Kimball: A conversation about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind on the 20th anniversary of its publication with Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion. by Notebook on Cities and Culture