Today’s episode is the second part of a two-episode series on John Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown. I wanted to do two episodes on this because the novel is fascinating, complex, and at times mystifying—and I wanted to get a few different perspectives to better understand it.
Today’s guest is Dr. Michael Boyden, a professor in both the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures as well as the Institute for Culture and History. His primary interest is in American literature, with a special focus on ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, and critical sustainability studies.
I read a fascinating article he published on To a God Unknown, which examines the novel from an ecological perspective, and I was eager to talk with him about it. We cover a lot of ground—some topics echo my first conversation with Dr. Rivers—but we dive deeper into the ecological dimensions this time around.
Today, we have an interview with Boris Dralyuk. Dralyuk is a literary translator, poet, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books....
In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Michael Zeitler for an expansive conversation about John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat — its mythic...
Before we begin our next major thematic section of the podcast on railroads, we will be looking at the life of Leland Stanford who...