Critics at Large | The New Yorker14 Mar 2024

The New Coming-of-Age Story

For centuries, the bildungsroman, or novel of education, has offered a window into a formative period of life—and, by extension, into the historical moment in which it’s set. Vinson Cunningham sent the draft of “Great Expectations,” a book loosely based on his experience on Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign, to publishers on January 6, 2021. Shortly after he hit Send, he watched rioters break into the Capitol building. “For me, it was, like, cycle complete,” he says. The age of optimism ushered in by Obama was over. “We are off to another thing.” Cunningham’s novel is part of a tradition that stretches back to the eighteen-hundreds: coming-of-age plots that chart their protagonists’ entry into adulthood. On this episode of Critics at Large, Cunningham and his fellow staff writers, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz, discuss how “Great Expectations” fits in the genre as a whole. They consider it alongside classic texts, like Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel “Sentimental Education,” and other, more recent entries, such as Carrie Sun’s 2024 memoir, “Private Equity,” and reflect on what such stories have to say about power, disillusionment, and our shifting relationships to institutions. “I think, if the bildungsroman has any new valence today, it is that the antagonist is not parents, it’s not religion, it’s not upbringing—these personal facets that you usually have to escape to come of age,” Cunningham says. “It’s the superstructure. It’s finance with a capital ‘F.’ It’s government with a capital ‘G.’ ” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(141)

Critics’ Cult Classics: Hannah Goldfield on the Food World’s Secret Tastemakers

In the second in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes devoted to the topic of cult classics, Naomi Fry talks with the New Yorker staff writer Hannah Goldfield about how that designation app...

13 Aug 39min

Critics’ Cult Classics: Hanif Abdurraqib on Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night”

When it dropped in January of 1997, Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night” thrilled some listeners and confounded others. On the first in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes devoted to resurfac...

6 Aug 46min

The Irony and the Ecstasy of Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s ascent in the literary world has seemed, like much of what he does, impressively effortless. Though he’s best known for “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys”—both of whic...

30 Jul 50min

The Golden Age of the American Idiot

The new game show “Nation’s Dumbest,” flips the classic “Jeopardy!” script on its head. The format: twelve famous-ish contestants are peppered with basic logic and trivia questions. The twist is that ...

23 Jul 52min

Who Owns the Odyssey?

In its nearly three-thousand-year history, the Odyssey has undergone as many twists and turns as its protagonist does on his journey home to Ithaca. Its origins as oral poetry suggest countless revisi...

16 Jul 50min

An American Playlist

This week, to commemorate two hundred and fifty years of the American experiment, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz present an American playlist. On this special episode, the hosts ...

2 Jul 59min

From The Political Scene: The Politics of the Big Game

Critics at Large will be back next week. In the meantime, you can hear Vinson Cunningham and Naomi Fry on a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Political Scene, hosted by Tyler Foggatt, where they cons...

25 Jun 37min

Steven Spielberg’s Blockbusters

When “Jaws” hit theatres in 1975, no one—neither the studio executives involved nor the film’s twenty-six-year-old director, Steven Spielberg—was betting on its success. But it dominated at the box of...

18 Jun 55min