Severance x the Kafkaesque

In this (spoiler-free) episode, we give YOU, the listener, all the tools you need to confidently and appropriately use the term Kafkaesque the next time Severance comes up in conversation. During Why This, Why Now?, Hannah guides Marcelle through some very compelling ideas about the show's popularity (did someone say "pandemic?"). We then move into The Theory We Need where the conversation turns to Marxism, surrealism, anti-capitalism and, you guessed it, Franz Kafka! The best news? By the end of the episode, you earn a MUSIC DANCE EXPERIENCE! Not really, (because we're a podcast), but we do end the episode with Hannah's thesis about state power, repression of grief, corporate culture and entertainment — and in a way, isn't that just as "elite" and "coveted AF?" To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back in two weeks with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there! We're currently doing a Patreon push, so please consider joining today to get all our extra perks, along with the backlog of bonuses! *** Material Girls is a show that aims to make sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand. *Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is really interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.