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Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Michael Dolzani

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This podcast is aimed at a non-specialist audience interested in acquiring what Northrop Frye called, in the title of one of his books, an educated imagination. Its materials are drawn from the many courses in literature and mythology that I taught, combined with material from my book The Productions of Time, for which I hope the podcast may provide an accessible introduction, with concrete examples.

Recent Episodes

OCT 20, 2026
Episode 290: Typology, Continued: The Bible’s Vision of History. The Exodus-Gospel Parallel.
The Bible’s vision of history is neither linear and progressive nor cyclical, but a unique combination of the two called typology, in which Old Testament types foreshadow New Testament antitypes that fulfill them. Hence what Northrop Frye calls the “double mirror” structure of the Bible, seen most clearly in the Exodus-Gospel parallel.
38 MIN
OCT 11, 2026
Episode 289: Typology: The Biblical Vision of History. A Unique Vision of History, Neither Linear nor Cyclical, but a Fusion of Both.
The unique organization of the Bible exists because of its vision of history, in which events symbolically recur, but clarified, fulfilled, moving towards and end. Each figure or event in the Old Testament is a type, of which something in the New Testament is its antitype, which is its clarified, revealed, fully realized form.
37 MIN
OCT 4, 2026
Episode 288: The Exodus as Imaginative Rather than Historical Pattern. Ex-hodos Means “the Way Out.” The Biblical Metaphor of the Journey or Way.
The Exodus is not conventional history but sacred history, not factual but not just a fiction. Its patterns are mythical and metaphorical. The myth of the journey or the “way” that begins here and runs through the rest of the Bible.
36 MIN
SEP 27, 2026
Episode 287: The Exodus. The Biblical Vision as an Overturn of Established Authority. The Vision of History as Linear and Progressive.
The Bible has been used to reinforce an authoritarian ideology of obedience to an elite, but in fact the Exodus, the defining event of the Old Testament, is a revolt against authority, and has had a powerful influence: “Let my people go.” The Biblical vision as historical and progressive rather than as endless cycles of death and renewal.
38 MIN
SEP 21, 2026
Episode 286: The Imagery of Sacrifice, Biblical and Classical. The Spiritualizing and Deliteralizing of Sacrifice.
The movement of religious thought from sacrifice as atonement to sacrifice as at-onement, outward legalistic act to an inward movement of the heart, from placating God or a god’s wrath to a self-sacrifice in the name of love. The two medieval theories of Christ’s Atonement as the sacrificial Lamb of God.
38 MIN