A new episode of “A Tale of Today” begins with an explanation of the forest charter and the enclosure of the commons through a revisionist version of a familiar story. The enclosure of the commons is then traced into The Gilded Age [8:00], before two scholars of the novel discuss its affective registers, as well as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s fraught attempts to periodize and historicize its contemporary political moment [21:00].
The Marguerite Casey Foundation and the Center For Mark Twain Studies are giving away fifteen copies of The Age of Insecurity. If you would like to be entered in the drawing, please send me a private message.
Cast (in order of appearance):
Astra Taylor is a writer, filmmaker, and activist, co-founder of the Debt Collective, and author, most recently, of The Age of Insecurity (AK Press, 2023), a collection of her 2023 Massey Lectures.
Nathan Wolff is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and the author of Not Quite Hope & Other Political Emotions in The Gilded Age (Oxford UP, 2019).
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.
Soundtrack:
All music for this season of The American Vandal Podcast comes from the Tennessee-based roots ensemble DownRiver Collective. Most of the tracks come from their most recent EP, Off The Shelf. You can purchase it direct from the band here. It’s also available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Tracks featured in this episode include “Walls” and “As It Was.”
Narration:
Excerpts from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age come from the audiobook edition produced by SNR Audio and narrated by Nathan Osgood. Available at Audible, as well as other audiobook retailers. SNR has an extensive catalog of professionally-narrated adaptations of 19th-century Anglophone fiction, including The Complete Mark Twain Collection.
Nathan Osgood is an actor and voice artist who has being appearing in films, scripted television, video games, podcasts, and audiobooks since the mid-’90s. In 2018, he played Mark Twain in the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly vehicle, Holmes and Watson.
Excerpts in this episode come from chapters thirty-four and one.
Episode Bibliography:
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011)
Lawrence Howe, “Narrating the Tennessee Land: Real Property, Fictional Land, & Mark Twain’s Literary Enterprise” American Literary Realism (Fall 2014)
Jeffrey Insko, History, Abolition, & The Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford UP, 2019)
Walter Johnson, “On Agency” Journal of Social History (Autumn 2023)
Walter Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story” in Slavery’s Ghost (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery & Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard UP, 2013)
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis & The Violent History of the United States (Basic Books, 2020)
Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, & The History of Atlantic Slavery” Amerikastudien (Winter, 2000)
Anna Kornbluh, “Present Tense Futures of The Past” Victorian Studies (Autumn 2016)
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties & Commons For All (UC Press, 2008)
Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (1937) [1983 University of Nebraska Edition]
Matt Seybold, “Neoclassical Twain: The Zombie Economics of Colonel Sellers” The Mark Twain Annual (2015)
Matt Seybold, “Neoliberal Rationality in The Old Gilded Age” (CMTS, 10.5.2018)
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983)
Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (AK Press, 2023)
Astra Taylor, “The Age of Insecurity: 2023 CBC Massey Lectures” (CBC, 2023)
Astra Taylor, What Is Democracy? (Zeitgeist Films, 2018)
Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) [2006 Modern Library Edition]
Mark Twain & William Dean Howells, “Colonel Sellers As A Scientist” (1883) in The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells (NYU Press, 1960)
Mark Twain, The American Claimant (Webster & Co., 1892)
Nathan Wolff, Not Quite Hope & Other Political Emotions In The Gilded Age (Oxford UP, 2019)
Slavoj Zizek, “Against The Populist Temptation” Critical Inquiry (Spring 2006)
Cruel Optimism & The Enclosure of The Commons (A Tale of Today, Episode #2)