American Literature Archives - Words To That Effect

March 31, 2021February 14, 2024 ConorAmerican Literature, Popular Culture, Science Fiction

Ep 51: Desert Fictions

How do we imagine and portray the desert? And what does it say about us and our relationship to each other and, crucially, to the planet we live on? In this, the second in a loosely connected series on places in fiction and popular culture, I chat to Dr Aidan read more…

December 10, 2019December 10, 2019 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Popular Culture

Ep 39: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs is no longer a familiar name. Like many other authors, the fame of his greatest creation, in his case Tarzan, has long eclipsed his own. But Burroughs was far more than the creator of Tarzan. He was an early pioneer of science fiction, a master of the read more…

February 25, 2019February 25, 2019 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, History, Science Fiction

Ep28: Pulp Fiction (Amazing Stories of the Sisters of Tomorrow)

If you want to understand how we ended up with anything from Star Wars to Star Trek, Superman to Batman, intergalactic travel to microscopic worlds, profound meditations on the nature of being human to thrilling tales about Martian princesses, you have to look at pulp fiction magazines. Argosy, Blue Book, read more…

Words To That Effect Live at Liberty Hall - tw

December 31, 2018December 31, 2018 Conor19th Century Literature, American Literature, History, Literature and Science, Medicine

Ep 24: Words To That Effect Live at Liberty Hall

Words To That Effect is back! Episode 24 is a recording of September’s live show for the Dublin Podcast Festival. This episode is a story about a long-forgotten nervous disease. But it’s also a story of science and culture, psychology and mental health, feminism and creativity, war and masculinity. It’s read more…

June 4, 2018February 17, 2019 Conor21st Century Literature, American Literature, British Literature, Crime, Irish Literature

Episode 20: Domestic Noir

Why Are There So Many Crime Thrillers With ‘Girl’ in the Title? Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive, Final Girls… There’s no shortage of crime novels with ‘girl’ in the title since the huge success of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller Gone Girl. But what do these read more…

March 26, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Literature and Science, Popular Culture, Science, Science Fiction

Episode 17: The 10% Brain Myth, from Self-Help to Pulp Fiction to Hollywood

Do we use only 10% of our brain capacity? (Hint: No) “It is estimated that most human beings only use 10% of the brain’s capacity. Imagine if we could access more of our cerebral capacity?” This is the central question of the 2014 Scarlett Johannson film, Lucy. And it is read more…

February 12, 2018February 19, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, American Literature, Horror, Popular Culture

Episode 14: H.P. Lovecraft & Weird Fiction

H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Fiction The American writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote weird fiction. His work is both weird, in the conventional sense of the word, and Weird, in a very specific sense. His tales are not typical horror stories, but instead invoke a type of cosmic terror, a slow realization read more…

October 2, 2017January 25, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Crime, History, Medicine, Science

Episode 8: A Lawyer, an Author, and a Murderer – The Trial of William Edward Hickman

“The most horrible crime of the 1920s” The case of William Edward Hickman went to trial in Los Angeles in 1928. The accused was charged with the gruesome murder of a 12-year-old girl, and he faced the death penalty. The trial was reported all across the U.S. because it was read more…

September 17, 2017January 4, 2018 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, American Literature, History

Owen Wister and the Fictional American West [Article]

Travelling Out West Episode 6 of Words To That Effect (listen here) looked at some of the influences of neurasthenia, a nervous ailment that was ultimately as cultural as it was medical. For men living in large Eastern U.S. cities, one of the frequently advised cures for neurasthenia was a read more…

September 4, 2017January 25, 2018 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, American Literature, Medicine, Supernatural

Episode 6: Neurasthenia, Cowboys, and Feminists

Neurasthenia: The “National Disease of America” In 1881 an American neurologist named George Miller Beard published a hugely influential book: American Nervousness. In it, he laid out the symptoms, cures, and implications of what he called “neurasthenia”, essentially what one might call nervous exhaustion. Beard didn’t coin the term but read more…

August 30, 2017January 4, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Science, Science Fiction

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Novels [Article]

Barsoom and Mars Life on Mars Percival Lowell’s theory of Martian life and the famous canals of Mars influenced a huge number of science fiction writers. Whether one believed that the canals really were proof of life on the red planet, the theory certainly offered plenty of scope for fiction. read more…

July 13, 2017January 9, 2018 ConorAmerican Literature, British Literature, Horror, Irish Literature, Supernatural

“He’s always going to be the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes” [Article]

When Authors are Overshadowed by their Creations: A Frankenstein Tale When Dr Victor Frankenstein brings his famous creature to life in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), it is not long before he has lost control of his creation. The creature is bigger, faster, and stronger than his creator and so, when read more…