The American Vandal

A two-part meditation on the history of journalism and the fate of investigative journalism under tech fascism begins with the model of Ida Tarbell, the epochal Wall Street Journal reporting on Facebook in 2021 [6:00], the professionalization of journalism during the Gilded Age and interbellum periods [38:00], the relationship between Silicon Valley and news organizations in the 21st century [54:00], the legacy of newspapers [63:00], and a periodization of print media [71:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Gil Duran, Matt Seybold, Jeff Horwitz, Andie Tucher, Jacob Silverman, Jeff Jarvis Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Gutenberg, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Our 150th anniversary celebration of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" turns to political economies of mass media, then and now, beginning with a close reading of the novel's title. We are then introduced to the tech fascist fantasy of the Network State [21:00], theories of post-capitalism [47:00], ways of reading from the right [58:00], and a more optimistic technofuturism [77:00} Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Gil Duran, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jordan Carroll, Douglas Dowland, Jeff Jarvis Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/GildedNetwork, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

The second act of "A Tale of Today," focused on HBCUs and the political economy of education in Gilded Ages old and new, concludes with a journey of curiosity through the unschooling movement, a historicist close reading of Ruth Bolton's time at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania [24:40], analysis of the transition from secondary schools to higher education [35:00], a summary of this part of the series [82:00], and hope from the forgotten migration [87:30]. Cast (in order of appearance): Astra Taylor, Matt Seybold, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Alexander Manshel, Annie Abrams, Crystal Sanders Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/JourneyOfCuriosity, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Following Jelani Favors's description of how the second curriculum of HBCUs has been compromised since the 1980s, we look back at the origins of Howard University in the Freedman's Bureau [10:00], discuss the labor history of literature instruction [28:00], and mark the college football playoffs by discussing the dehumanization of athletic workers with the authors of "The End of College Football" [44:30]. Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jelani Favors, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/StudentWorkers, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Archives, physical and digital, are suffering from austerity, enshittification, and censorship. In this episode scholars discuss the ambivalent impacts of digitization, what information matters in the data economy [8:30], an analogy involving European colonialism [23:00], the competition to document between corporations and universities [46:00], the duty to tell the truth freely [73:30], preserving the counternarratives to empire [81:00], and managing an archive through Orbanization [95:30]. Cast (in order of appearance): Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Matt Seybold, Kelly Grotke, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Leigh Claire La Berge, Crystal Sanders, Jared Loggins, Andrew Douglas, Timothy Barber Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/ArchiveOfEmpire, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

"A Tale Of Today" returns with an episode inspired by "The Teaching Archive." Its authors discuss the pedagogical innovations of HBCUs and strategies for teaching literary history, followed by the legacy of New Historicism in the classroom [14:00], the model of the Monks of Lindisfarne [24:00], the historical rivalry between professors and journalists [36:30], the archives of HBCU student newspapers [43:00], and a reporter who spent decades on the education beat [64:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Laura Heffernan, Rachel Buurma, Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Eleanor Courtemanche, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jelani Favors, Samuel Freedman Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/TeachingArchive, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

An episode built around an interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom covers what lessons the rest of Higher Ed can learn from HBCUs [3:00], the vectors of financialization in the New Gilded Age [19:00], the migration of the for-profit model into not-for-profit institutions [60:00], and how Modern Monetary Theory might invigorate the Black University Concept [84:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Jared Loggins, Matt Seybold, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kelly Grotke, Andrew Douglas Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/LoweEd, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

A Morehouse college commencement speaker makes an extraordinary financial commitment, but there's a "profound story" to tell about the durable funding of HBCUs in the US since the Gilded Age [12:00]. How does philanthrocapitalism work? [42:00] What is the Double Tax? [48:00] How might EdTech extract "intellectual capital" from HBCUs? [54:00] Can the second curriculum be sustained inside a philanthrocapitalist university? [64:00] Are HBCUs the vanguard of a new era of disruption to education? [74:00] Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Andrew Douglas, Jared Loggins, Kelly Grotke, Crystal Sanders, Jelani Favors, Dominique Baker Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Morehouse, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

A brief history of HBCUs through conversations with five scholars about the second curriculum which informs movements for Civil Rights in the midcentury US, segregation scholars and the long withholding of postbaccalaureate education from HBCUs [40:00], the aspirational Black University Concept in W.E.B. DuBois and Vincent Harding [75:00], and the challenges facing HBCU students today [84:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jelani Favors, Crystal Sanders, Andrew Douglas, Jared Loggins, Dominique Baker Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/HBCU, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

As Nathan Wolff himself puts it, his recent keynote address at the 2024 Quarry Farm Fall Symposium is "very much in dialogue with The American Vandal." In this talk, Wolff not only summarizes Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's "The Gilded Age" (1873), but further interpolates it with concepts like Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism, György Lukács's historical novel, and Raymond Williams's structures of feeling, all of which have been cited frequently in our "A Tale of Today" series. While this episode departs from the usual format of this podcast, listeners to the current season will undoubtedly see the synergy between recent episodes and Wolff's excellent keynote. Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Nathan Wolff Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/FirstAsFarce, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com If you would prefer to watch Nathan Wolff speak, the keynote is also available via our YouTube Channel.

Organized around a comparison of György Lukács's "The Historical Novel" and Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner's "The Gilded Age," in this episode we take a detour from Jameson to Lukács, question what realism means [8:30], whether "The Gilded Age" is a historical novel [19:30], whether historical novels are intrinsically conservative [33:30}, whether novelists can live up to Lukács's high expecations [41:00], what distinguishes historical novels from historical fictions [64:30], and who are the "spreasheet men" [85:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Brandon Taylor, Matt Seybold, Eleanor Courtemanche, Nathan Wolff, Anna Kornbluh, Jeffrey Insko, Alexander Manshel Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Lukacs, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

From Fredric Jameson on why "the most important goal is history itself" follows a series of conversations about dialectical criticism vs. new historicism [5:00], the wisdom of "always historicizing" [17:30], the anxiety of influence between new historicism and literary fiction [34:00] as well as between literary fiction and history [53:00], hinge points and shadow presentisms [59:00], and the layers of discourse about history in 2024 [88:30]. Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Robert Tally, Alexander Manshel, Walter Johnson Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/AlwaysHistoricize, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

What's the difference? The episode opens with defenses of presentism by two literary critics and a reception history of "The Gilded Age" [6:30] before turning to a critique of resistance history from within the discipline [12:30], a response from a prominent historian [44:30], a consideration of the standpoint of resistance history [67:30], and why aren't there more literary critics on MSNBC? [75:30] Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Walter Johnson, Astra Taylor Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/ResistanceHistory, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Earlier this Summer, Matt Seybold asked Anna Kornbluh what Fredric Jameson meant to literary criticism. On the occasion of his passing, we'd like to share her answer.

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]. Cast (in order of appearance): Astra Taylor, Matt Seybold, Nathan Wolff Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/RobinHood, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

A new season inspired by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 150-year-old novel, "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today," launches with an introduction to Colonel Sellers; a discussion of Astra Taylor's "The Age of Insecurity" (2023) [10:00]; questions about the discipline of history in the contemporary moment [28:00]; and Walter Johnson reflecting on resistance and his 20-year-old essay "On Agency" [41:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Astra Taylor, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Walter Johnson Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/AgeOfInsecurity, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

Recorded at The Ohio State University, as part of the Project Narrative series, Matt Seybold reflects on the making of "Criticism LTD" [3:15], as well as ongoing Ponzi austerity, reassessment of close reading, and AI speculative euphoria since its conclusion [14:30]. James Phelan (Director of Project Narrative) argues for narrative theory's contributions to literary studies as a discipline [35:30] and they take questions from the audience [47:50]. Theme Song: "A Little Bit Strange To Begin With" by Redd Holt & The Heptet Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, James Phelan, Amanpal Garcha, Sandra Macpherson, Brian McHale, Christine Tulley For a bibliography of this episode, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/AfterCriticismLTD or subscribe to Matt Seybold's substack at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

From the production studios of Ohio State University, American Vandal host, Matt Seybold, and James Phelan, the Director of Project Narrative, read aloud Chapter 18 of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain [3:40], then discuss it [30:00] with emphases on the opportunities the chapter presents for types of close reading. This episode is a crossover with the Project Narrative podcast, which you can learn more about at ProjectNarrative.osu.edu. For our episode bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/ProjectNarrative or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

The finale episode of our miniseries on corporate allegory was recorded the day after the publication of Anna Kornbluh's "Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism" by Verso. With numerous allusions to the book, Matt Seybold asks Kornbluh and "City of Industry" blogger J. D. Connor to consider the potential "perfect storm" of media disruption in 2024. Among the topics they cover are the enshittification of social, search, & and streaming, the investor-led rush to profitability justifiying downsizing across media sectors, the speculative euphoria associated with AI-generated art, and the eroding boundaries between media forms. Theme Song: "This Year" by The Steel Wheels For more about this episode, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/TwentyTwentyFour or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

Our series on corporate allegory continues with an extended discussion of Apple TV+, both its film and television offerings, as well as the relationship between such "content" and the corporation's primary business: selling iPhones and other hardware. Among the specific works discussed are "Severance," "Killers Of The Flower Moon," "Lessons In Chemistry," "Fingernails," "Gutsy," "The Foundation," "Silo," "Ted Lasso," "The Last Thing He Told Me," and, most extensively, "The Morning Show." Theme Song: "This Year" by The Steel Wheels For more about this episode, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/AppleTV or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

In an episode which operates as both coda to "Criticism LTD" and herald of 2024, Matt Seybold is joined by two scholars working on the complex history and sometimes conflicting methods of close reading. They also discuss the reception of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed The Publishing Industry (Columbia UP, 2023) [31:00] and a bevy of novels by Danielle Steel, including The Promise (1978), Happiness (2023), and Worthy Opponents (2023) [39:00]. Theme Song: "This Year" by The Steel Wheels For more about this episode, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Steel or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

A new season on corporate allegory, business melodrama, and new releases from academic presses kicks off with a discussion of the recent Mike Flanagan adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall Of The House of Usher" for Netflix. For more about this episode, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Usher or TheAmericanVandal.Substack.com

"Criticism LTD" concludes its lengthy examination of the unanswerable questions about the state of literary studies with a lengthy consideration of "The Future of Decline" [8:00], the delusion of progress [16:00], the British model of declinist politics [22:00] and literary criticism [29:00], an insider's account of the long tail of "The Chicago Fight" [45:00], the libertarian rejoinder [54:00], and the curriculum of cruelty [61:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Kim Adams, Saronik Bosu, Matt Seybold, Jed Esty, Bruce Robbins, Beci Carver, Gerald Graff, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera Soundtrack: Joe Locke's "Makram" For episode bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/EmpireOfCriticism, or subscribe to our newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.SubStack.com, where you will also receive episode transcripts.

In the second part of the finale of "Criticism LTD," we hear about the origins of Jacque Derrida's "Limited Inc." from its editor, the fraught alliance between criticism and history [17:00], the Center For The Literary Arts at Washington University in St. Louis [33.00], the transition from creative writer to working critic [62:00], and critical vocationalism [72:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Gerald Graff, Matt Seybold, Jed Esty, Ignacio Infante, Danielle Dutton, Ryan Ruby Soundtrack: Joe Locke's "Makram" For episode bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/EmpireOfCriticism, or subscribe to our newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.SubStack.com, where you will also receive episode transcripts.

The tripartite finale of "Criticism LTD" begins with a the feud between Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain, followed by "Bed Glee" [14:00], "Outing Criticism" [40:00], and "The Fate of Professional Reading" [59:00] Cast (in order of appearance): Beci Carver, Kim Adams, Ryan Ruby, Ainehi Edoro, Jed Esty, Matt Seybold, Gerald Graff, Harry Stecopoulos Soundtrack: Joe Locke's "Makram" For episode bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/EmpireOfCriticism, or subscribe to our newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.SubStack.com, where you will also receive episode transcripts.