Episode 830: Stendhal with Hadley Suter

We often say it's important for a person to be "authentic," but what does that mean? Why is that necessarily a good thing?

In Episode 830 of the History of Literature Podcast, Jacke talks to author Hadley Suter (Becoming Stendhal: The Performance of Authenticity and the Making of a Novelist) about the French novelist Stendhal (1783-1842) and his classic realist novels The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black.

Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when individuals suddenly found themselves with the opportunity to become someone new, Stendhal was acutely aware of the blurred lines between performance and authencity. How did he and his characters figure out who they wanted to be - and what happened when they tried to achieve it? What can their efforts tell us about our own understanding of identity and self-actualization? 

For more about Stendhal -- in this episode from the archives, Jacke takes a look at the life and works of French author Stendhal (1783-1842), whose innovative novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma made him one of the greatest and most influential novelists of all time.