Hello and welcome back to hardcore literature. Today we're talking about the picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Oh, it's going to be a good show. The picture of Dorian Gray is one of my favorite books and I've recently reread it and I got so much from it. What we're going to do today? We're going to do a close reading of certain parts of the book. It's a short book, so if you haven't read it, well,

there's going to be some spoilers and it's very, very short. You can read it in a night,

two nights, three nights, so I implore you to read it. It is, I don't want to say it's fun.

Sumptuous might be the word, but also harrowing and haunting. And the themes that that wild deals with are tragic and enduring but we're going to do close readings of we're going to do the beginning the very beginning and the very

end and we're going to do a sort of Talmudic tradition of picking it apart and just getting as much meaning out of it as possible.

And then we're going to do a sort of synoptic reading where we attach it, latch on, connect it to

everything else we know about the world.

We're also going to deal with the themes of the book.

So we're going to talk about confession.

We're going to talk about art and different theories of art, particularly Wild's theory of art. We'll talk about narcissism. Ultimately, this whole podcast is a quick crash course in how to read Oscar Wilde, specifically how to read the picture of Dorian Gray. There are different toolkits, different approaches and strategies one must use to unlock the powers of different

literature. You read Tolstoy in a different manner than the manner which you read Wilde.

And this is the same Yeats, Keats, you're going to read everybody a little bit different.

So we're going to talk about what's so great about Oscar Wilde. And the thing about this podcast is this episode is going to leave you unsatisfied.

And I think Oscar Wilde would be proud of that.

He talks about cigarettes being the perfect pleasure because they leave you so deliciously unsatisfied.

There is so much to talk about here.

And we're going to talk about all his other works

at another time. He's got brilliant plays, brilliant criticism, great essays. He's a critic of Shakespeare,

but we're just going to deal with his theory of art in the picture of Dorian Gray. And we're going

to sort of try to touch the genius of Oscar Wild.

If you haven't read a lot of Wild, if you haven't read any Wild, you already know many of his famous aphorisms.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

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