Think About It

What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankind's true beginnings inform political and social practices to this day. How do the various stories we tell about human origins, including those about neanderthals, homo sapiens, killer apes, noble savages, and missing links shape the modern world? Have you followed a keto diet, become aware of your reptile brain, idealized a pre-modern state of existence or demonized others as behaving like Neanderthals? Geroulanos explains how accounts of prehistory arise in particular historical moments to solve contemporary problems, often linked to but as often quite apart from actual scientific knowledge. The Invention of Prehistory provides a crucial and timely examination of how the pursuit of understanding humanity's beginnings has been intertwined with agendas of war and domination. Further Listening on the Think About It podcast: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “The Social Contract” with Melissa Schwartzberg Michel Foucault on Truth and Knowledge with Ann Stoler Sigmund Freud's “Civilization and its Discontents” with Peter Brooks The Alarmingly Relevant Hannah Arendt with Richard Bernstein Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior is not only not shocking but that we should in fact expect democracies to give rise to un- and even anti-democratic forces. Mencken doubted that such the evils of democracy will be cured by more democracy, which usually means elections and ‘fostering democratic norms and behaviors. So what is to be done? I spoke with NYU Professor and political commentator Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the current threats to democracy posed by populism, the media's role in shaping political views, what historical precedents of strongmen can teach us about today's threats to democracy, and what is crucially missing from today's political landscape. Find the texts: Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2021) by Ruth Ben-Ghiat Notes On Democracy (1926) by H. L. Mencken Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a distinguished expert in the history of fascism and is appointed at NYU as Professor of History and Italian. A leading authority on the contemporary challenges facing democracies globally, she frequently provides insights as a commentator for various news networks and contributes as an MSNBC opinion columnist. In her newsletter, Lucid, she delves into the critical issues threatening democracy. Her work has been recognized with Guggenheim, NEH, Fulbright and other fellowships. Her latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present explores the regimes and rise to power of authoritarian leaders, while proposing strategies for their defeat. Follow her here: Twitter @RuthBenGhiat; Instagram @RuthBenGhiat. Ulrich Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer; IG: @thinkaboutit.podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim's captivity on into each generation of readers.” Ernest Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Ralph Waldo Ellison added that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.”  I spoke with Cleo McNelly Kearns, author of a seminal essay on Jim's role in the book, about Huckleberry Finn as a challenge and an opportunity for 21st-century readers to understand ourselves, our country, and our moral obligations more accurately. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed values of free speech and academic inquiry? Bradford Vivian examines the heated debates over campus misinformation as a language unto itself that confirms existing notions and often provides simple explanations for complex shared problems. In his book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP), he shows how the free speech crisis on US college campuses has been manufactured through misinformation, distortion, and political ideology, and how campus misinformation is a threat not only to academic freedom but also to civil liberties in US society writ large. In our conversation, Bradford explained how campus speech crises are used – and also how faculty, administrators, students and others can recognize recurring patterns and properly respond, for example to distinguish between abuses of scientific evidence and sound scientific claims in public argument. Bradford Vivian is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching focuses on theories of rhetoric (or the art of persuasion) and public controversies over memory, history, speech and other issues. Among his books are Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press), Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (Penn State Press) and Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation (SUNY Press). He is also co-editor, with Anne Teresa Demo, of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (Routledge). He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and, from the National Communication Association, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Critical/Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award, and the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John's College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John's takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary readings without disciplinary boundaries. Louis Petrich and I talked about teaching and reading Classic Books as a means of deepening rather than resolving the mystery of who we are, what we do, and how best to engage the world around us. St. John's offers the series Continuing the Conversation with professors where “questions are more important than answers,” which is a natural companion to Think About It. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the revolutionary tradition from - and against - which legendary anarchist feminist Emma Goldman sprung. Goldman refused the austere image of the revolutionary. For her, sex, passion, and love were inextricable from the human experience, and thus also inextricable from political life. She maintained, as Gornick says, a “timeless hunger for living life on a grand scale.” In her own—now famous—words: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution.” Goldman had immigrated from Lithuania to Rochester, New York in 1885 and became America's "most dangerous woman" by the powers that be of her time. Gornick, the radical feminist critic celebrated for Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Romance of American Communism (1977), recounts Goldman's progression as an anarchist and feminist. Goldman's feminism was often ambiguous. But Gornick suggests that precisely these conflicts explain her continued influence over generations of feminists after her. On the podcast, we spoke about Goldman's radical political program and their resonance in our time. Gornick also wrote an original preface for a new Goldman reader from Warbler Press, The Essential Emma Goldman—Anarchism, Feminism, Liberation (2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Virginia Woolf's 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer's views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopal Saikumar, who is completing a dissertation on Woolf, Hurston, Baldwin and Gandhi and the “duty to disobey” at NYU, explain Woolf's arguments, the reasons for the shocked response by most of her peers, and why Three Guineas remains so relevant for our time. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir Eshel, both of Stanford University to discover what is at stake in Arendt's unusual biography, why the book meant at once so much to Arendt and why she nonetheless almost neglected to publish it, and what this biography of a Jewish women in 19th century Berlin can teach us today about questions of identity, belonging, assimilation, women, Jews, anti-Semitism, freedom, politics, the private and the public, and many of the other topics that concerned Arendt throughout her lifetime. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Halfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It's easy to write off his message that communication is vital for human existence. He's a shell-shocked World War I vet, who, in this moment, hallucinates that the birds are communicating with him in grief. But in her landmark 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf understands his traumatized psyche with deep generosity and compassion. Indeed, the book's pervasive sense is that “it takes a lot of bravery to live a single day,” but that such everyday bravery is amply, richly, wonderfully rewarded in even the simplest of acts. I spoke with Anne Fernald about Mrs Dalloway's profound politics of emotion—and a host of other ideas. Anne is Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. She is the editor of Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and the Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2021), and the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006). Her incredible knowledge of and love for Woolf is itself an act of bravery, as you can hear in our conversation. You can find Warbler Press's authoritative edition, with a new introduction by me, here. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the formation of American identity in general. In her short, incisive book, Nobel-prize winner Morrison explores the ways in which canonical authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway conspicuously invented African American characters for their projects of creating American identity – and how critics have deliberately overlooked, ignored or dismissed this dimension of the American canon. Morrison's point is not to out these writers as racist or to cancel their works but to explain the role of African American figures in the aesthetic and artistic project of inventing American identity and a canon of national literature. I spoke with Paul Edwards, who is my colleague as Assistant Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at New York University and a book reviews editor for The Black Scholar. Professor Edwards's current book project, The Black Wave: The New Negro Renaissance in Interwar Germany, reveals the effects of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance in Germany from 1925 to 1938. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in post-World War I Europe whose relationships unravel as they travel from Paris to the bullfights in Spain. Unsettling, provocative, and inspiring to this day, this legendary novel about loyalty, love, and betrayal challenges readers to discover what it takes to be true to oneself. Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay put it well: “[w]hen Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realists and said: ‘You can't fake about life like that.'” And Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of Invisible Man (podcast), said: “Because Hemingway loved the American language and the joy of writing…he was in many ways the true father-as-artist of so many of us who came to writing during the late thirties.” I spoke with Professor Linda Patterson Miller to understand why the novel had such an impact, what the book meant for the “lost generation” after World War I, how to read Hemingway from a feminist perspective, and how best to address parts of the novel that strike us as offensive today. Inspired by this conversation, I wrote an essay on the conspicuous use of the n-word in The Sun Also Rises for a new edition of the novel published by Warbler Press that charts a path beyond the cancel-or-defend-at-all-cost positions in today's culture wars. Professor Miller teaches at Pennsylvania State University's campus in Abington, Pennsylvania, has written seminal essays on Hemingway and other authors, and is the editor of Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends (2002). Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticulously researched historical novel that breathes new life into a writer who continues to charm and fascinate readers and audiences to this day. Ardythe Ashley is the author of The Return of the Century: The Death and Further Adventures of Oscar Wilde. While doing research for the novel, she found herself in the Library of the British Museum reading the letters Oscar Wilde wrote in his dank cell in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), later published as De Profundis. “I'm sorry, Madam,” came the firm-but-not-unkind voice of a white-gloved librarian, “but it is not permitted to weep upon the manuscripts.” In addition to being a writer, Ashley is a retired psychoanalyst. A retired psychoanalyst, Ashley is also the author of the novels The Christ of the Butterflies and In The Country of the Great King. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Joyce's 1914 collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, is righty considered one of the greatest literary achievements of Western modernity. But what is so original about these stories that begin with childhood, cover adolescence and adult choices, and conclude with a deeply moving reflection on our mortality? What life-changing experiences are their center, and how does Joyce understand such epiphanies? And who is Joyce, who writes the stories about life in Dublin after having left his native Ireland for Italy? What did Joyce set out to do in Dubliners, before he embarked on writing Ulysses, which appears in 1922 in France? John Waters teaches Irish literature and culture at New York University, and explains on this podcast the cultural context for Joyce's stories and highlights several moments where Joyce lets his characters reach their expressive competence – meaning that the stories take us to the edge of human emotions and experience without becoming meaningless or incomprehensible. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke with Professor Dora Zhang at the University of California at Berkeley who teaches a course on “the good life,” using mostly literary rather than philosophical texts. From Sophokles's Antigone (441 B.C.) to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2020); from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) to the idea of “cruel optimism” advanced by literary critic Lauren Berlant, Zhang's course is not intended to leave students depressed about their prospects but motivated to rethink what they've been told to hope for and aspire to. I loved this conversation with a gifted and brilliant teacher, which was also a sort of homecoming for me since I had been a freshman student at the University of California at Berkeley some 30 years ago, where I discovered that my love of literature could become the basis of a career. Professor Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual culture, aesthetics, and ecocriticism. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto. Her book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2020), shows how description is far more than stage-setting or background in modernist novels. She's also published on Proust and photography, Woolf and the philosophy of language, the role of atmospheres in everyday life, and Roland Barthes's travels in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charlie Louth's illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke's poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European culture irrevocably lurching into modernity, where an entire continent was forced to trade in its untenable and ultimately fantastically unrealistic Romantic worldview for the sober realization that humans are capable of even greater evil than any gods, and that life has meaning only if we continually create it. But unlike some other modernists, Rilke captured this vast cultural rupture in exceptionally beautiful and ever more effectively crafted, if ever less formal, poetry. Instead of explaining this effect away, Louth deepens the transformative experience of reading Rilke by offering his interpretation as one option among others and thus engaging the reader directly in the unfolding of each of Rilke's words. Louth's book follows the chronology of Rilke's life (1875 – 1926) but focuses on the works, often in the context of the situation when they were written, rather than on Rilke's itinerant life. I spoke with Charlie about the enduring importance of Rilke, about the Duino Elegies, and whether Rilke's 1915 poem “Death” – or any of his works in general – can alleviate the cold fact that as humans, no matter how blessed, we will face inconsolable loss. Charlie Louth is Associate Professor of German and Fellow of Queen's College, at Oxford University, in England. His research interests include poetry from the 18th century onwards, especially Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Celan; romanticism; translation; and comparative literature. His books include: Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford: OUP, 2020); Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 1998); (editor, with Patrick McGuinness), Gravity and Grace: Essays for Roger Pearson (Oxford: Legenda, 2019); (editor, with Florian Strob), Nelly Sachs im Kontext — eine »Schwester Kafkas«? (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), and other works. He's also translated Rilke's Letters to Young Poet & The Letter from the Young Worker (Penguin, 2011). Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where, when, and how does American literature begin? What constitutes the canon of U.S. literature, and how is it distinct? While monuments and history books are the most prominent battlefields in our current culture wars, the debate over what belongs in the canon of great American literature has not subsided. I spoke with Professor Sarah Rivett, Professor of English and American Studies and Affiliated Faculty of Indigenous Studies at Princeton University, about American literature. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Professor Rivett specializes in early American and transatlantic literature, religion, and indigenous history. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011), which was awarded the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, and Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of  Literary Nation (2017).  I was especially interested in speaking with Professor Rivett since she enthusiastically endorsed Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts, which I co-edited with Smaran Dayal (Warbler Press, 2020) 

Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice delights, charms and entrances readers since its anonymous publication in 1813. The Bennett sisters need to marry rich, for otherwise they'll fall into poverty and social disgrace. Will arrogant Mr. Darcy be the solution, and will the fiercely proud, intelligent and also charming Elizabeth settle for this socially imposed scheme for women's happiness? Or does Austen put a twist on the hackneyed romance plot that made this book into the blueprint for countless re-tellings but keeps it separate from them - whether they are written by Charlotte Brontë or in the season episode of The Bachelor, any Hollywood rom-com, or Love is Blind? I talked with one of the great Austen experts of our time (Austen fanatics are called "Janeites," I learned), Professor Wendy Lee of New York University. Wendy explains why readers like Winston Churchill have turned to Austen in times of crisis, how Pride and Prejudice transcends the hackneyed dead-end storyline of romance as every woman's goal and fulfillment, and why Austen's novel rewards re-reading like few other books. How does Elizabeth get over Darcy's cruel snub at the first ball, and is Mrs. Bennett correct that the country has as many interesting people as one would ever need to meet for one's happiness? Find out in this episode on one of the greatest novels of all time, now also available in a newly edited version by Warbler Press with an Afterword by me, Ulrich Baer. Wendy Lee is the author of Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel, and also runs some reading groups that are open to the public. 

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution in fiction, I spoke with Professor Marlene Daut specialized in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, was published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press' Series in the Study of International Slavery. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, was published in fall 2017 from Palgrave Macmillan’s series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is  also working on a collaborative project entitled, An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery), which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti. She also curates a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.  "Theresa. A Haytien Tale," (1828) is the first known published story by an African-American writer in the United States. The story appeared in four installments in Freedom’s Journal, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the U.S. from 1827 - 1829. The story was rediscovered by pioneering scholar Frances Smith Foster. The story is now included in Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts.     —————————   //////////////////   Follow us: (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/thinkaboutit.podcast/ . (ULI BAER) TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/uli.baer WEBSITE - https://woodson.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/mld9b . (MARLENE DAUT) TWITTER - https://twitter.com/fictionsofhaiti INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/fictionsofhaiti ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnaJi-J359remsMZ3Y2EJMQ   Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

Today we talk a lot about a need for genuine dialogue, and for conversations across partisan divides and differences. What is a true, authentic, and meaningful conversation? Martin Buber's landmark 1923 book, I and Thou, examines and also proposes how genuine dialogue can happen. The short book proposes that "I and Thou," and "I and It" are inseparable word pairs rather than sets of 2 distinct terms, and that once we understand ourselves are already in relation with others, rather than atomistic subjects reaching out to others, it changes our lives. I spoke with Buber's biographer and expert, Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, of the University of Chicago and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to clarify Buber's points and the impact of this powerful, prophetic and poetic book which is not only a landmark of 20th-century intellectual history but also one of the most influential books of Western theology.   —————————   //////////////////   Follow us: (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/thinkaboutit.podcast/ . (ULI BAER) TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/uli.baer   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnaJi-J359remsMZ3Y2EJMQ   Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

Hannah Arendt's 1967 essay on "Truth and Politics" centers on the uneasy relation between truth-telling and politics. Lying has always been part of politics, Arendt says, but something shifts with the wholesale attack on our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and make-believe. How can we be committed to the truth when politicians play fast and loose with it? Professor Samantha Hill will soon publish a new biography of Arendt and has immersed herself in Arendt's archives to grasp how the political thinker arrived at the concepts that have been revived recently to make sense of our currently political moment - with the rise of populism, attacks on the press as 'fake news,' heated debates about the role of free speech, and even cancel culture, of which Arendt fell victim not only once but twice. Professor Hill is the Assistant Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Bard College, in New York State.   —————————   //////////////////   Follow us: (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/thinkaboutit.podcast/ . (ULI BAER) TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/uli.baer . (SAMANTHA HILL) TWITTER - https://twitter.com/Samantharhill WEBSITE - https://www.samantharosehill.com   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnaJi-J359remsMZ3Y2EJMQ   Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order of angels?" This angsty cry opens poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- one of the greatest poetic masterpieces of all time that grounds us, modern beings, in a disenchanted, mechanized, and godless world. Is there a meaning to our lives beyond our immediate, material conditions that does not involve the temptations of religion, politics, or ideology? For Rilke, only two experiences activate that part of ourselves which makes us greater: love, including erotic love, and the experience of death, never available to us.  I spoke with poet Mark Wunderlich, who is deeply interested in how we exist on this earth as a setting for our experience, and who also loves Rilke, about these 10 poems, most of which Rilke famously wrote in a fit of creativity (in a single week!) exactly 99 years ago this month. Mark Wunderlich is the author of God of Nothingness, The Earth Avails, and other volumes of poetry. He is also Director of Creative Writing at Bennington College, in Vermont. I have loved Rilke, like many people, ever since reading his Letters to a Young Poet, which I translated into English, and which another great lover of Rilke, the artist Lady Gaga, has tatooed on her arm. I've translated other letters by Rilke: those on life, and his startlingly beautiful letters of condolence, in The Dark Interval, also available in an audio book recorded by the amazing Rosanne Cash.   —————————   //////////////////   Follow us:   (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST)   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/thinkaboutit.podcast/ . (ULI BAER)   TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/uli.baer . (MARK WUNDERLICH)   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/mark_wunderlich WEBSITE - www.markwunderlich.com   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on:   APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV   YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnaJi-J359remsMZ3Y2EJMQ   Thanks for listening! :)

Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who questions her life choices, and seeks something else. What does she want? I spoke with Professor Rafael Walker, who has written and thought deeply about Chopin's writings, to find out whether Chopin's novel fits into the narrative of unhappy-woman-seeks-liberation, - or whether Chopin is perhaps after something else altogether in this story of a woman's quest to be herself.  Professor Walker is assistant professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and specializes in American literature, African American literature, women's literature, and the novel. He is also affiliated with  Baruch College's Black and Latino Studies Department, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis (A.B.) - where Kate Chopin also lived.   —————————   //////////////////   Follow us:   (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST)   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/thinkaboutit.podcast/ . (ULI BAER)   TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/uli.baer . (RAFAEL WALKER)   TWITTER - https://twitter.com/raf_walker   INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/raffie_walker   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on:   APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902   SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV   YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnaJi-J359remsMZ3Y2EJMQ   Thanks for listening! :)

The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels ever written and a masterpiece of American fiction. Midwesterner Nick Carraway spends a summer on Long Island where he is lured into the ultra-glamorous parties and social circle of his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. It is a tale of obsessive passion, reckless decadence, excess, and disillusionment, but also of the power of love and dreams to alter our world. Fitzgerald’s glittering portrayal of 1920s elite society during the Jazz Age is an enduring testament to the tantalizing power and peril of the American Dream. I personally consider Carraway one of the most despicable characters in all of America's fiction, because he trades in his capacity for dreaming for an arrogant and superior sense of detached knowledge. He's just barely saved from full-on nihilism by his encounter with Gatsby... and I don't mind Jordan Baker, nor Daisy, and of course my heart goes out to Myrtle... but listen for yourself (and check out my Afterword to a newly released edition of The Great Gatsby published by Warbler Press). I spoke with John Collins, Founding Artistic Director of the experimental theater company, Elevator Repair Service, which has staged Gatz, a word-by-word enactment of Fitzgerald's novel, in a 6.5 hours-long stage production. Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to instant acclaim. He soon after married  and his wife Zelda, and the two embodied spirit of the Jazz Age—the glamour and grit which Fitzgerald captured in stories and novels that powerfully resonate today, including The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night. Haunted by alcoholism, marital problems, and Zelda’s illness, Fitzgerald took his immense literary talents to the dream factories of Hollywood where he died in 1940 while working on his unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon.   ///////////////   Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @uli.baer  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast JOHN COLLINS - @erscollins / Elevator Repair Service Website / @erstheater   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer    ////////////////   Thanks for listening! :)

Who was the first Chinese American writer to publish in America?  Sui Sin Far, or Edith Maude Eaton, was born to a British father and Chinese mother who immigrated from England first to the U.S. and then to Montreal in 1873. She first published articles on the racist laws and practices that limited the civil rights and social standing of Chinese Canadians and Chinese Americans. Although she could have “passed” for a white woman under her Western name, she adopted the name Sui Sin Far and, during a time of intense Sinophobia, aligned herself with Chinese Americans. Far settled in San Francisco and then in Seattle’s small but growing Chinatown. With her stories, many of which feature Chinese American characters grappling with assimilation, cultural differences, and social conditions, she becomes one of the first authors to present a positive image of Chinese American life for general readers and is considered the first Asian American author to publish fiction in America. Her stories have been recognized by scholars for their literary merit. Her sense of irony, deft character descriptions and dynamic dialogue in situations specific to the Asian American and Asian Canadian communities render moral dilemmas with universal resonance.  I spoke with one of the great experts on Sui Sin Far and her sister, Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna): Professor Mary Chapman, Professor of English and Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Eaton, who also directs a crucial website: https://www.winnifredeatonarchive.org/   ///////////////   Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @uli.baer  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast   ////////////////   Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer    ////////////////   Thanks for listening! :)

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, and the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language. A poet who wrote in at least two languages, navigated several cultures and expressed her pride of belonging to the Ojibwe (Chippewa) people in both English and Ojibwe poems, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft invites us to reconsider existing categories for understanding American and American Indian literacy. Schoolcraft (her English name) or Bamewawagezhikaquay (her Ojibwe name, meaning “Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky”), was born as one of eight children in 1800 in Sault Ste. Marie in today’s state of Michigan, then a cross-cultural hub of British, French, Canadian and American Indian influence. Her mother, Ozhaguscodaywayquay, was born in Chequamegon in the mid 1770s in the northern part of what is now Wisconsin as the daughter of Waubojeeg, a renowned Ojibwe warrior and chief also known for his skills in story-telling and son; her Irish-born father, John Johnston was a fur trader who greatly valued books. Jane was educated at home, reading widely and speaking and writing Ojibwe, English and French, with a brief and difficult interlude with an aunt in Ireland where she might have attended school. In 1823 she married Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), who has become known as the first person to record a large body of American Indian stories. They had three children but their first-born, William Henry, died at age two, and one daughter was stillborn. With Jane’s assistance Henry published The Literary Voyager or Muzzenyegun, which included some of Jane’s writings without attribution. When Jane died unexpectedly in 1842, she had written literary prose pieces and poems, only a small number of which had appeared in a handwritten magazine produced by her husband.  I spoke with Professor Robert Dale Parker of the University of Illinois, who discovered, edited and published Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's poetry in The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, as well as Changing is not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, in addition to books on Faulkner, and on critical theory. We talked about the ambiguous status of being "the first," about Native American poetry, about Jane's life, and about several of her moving, searing and strangely timely poems. Her beautiful poem, "Sweet Willy," was recorded in a gorgeous rendition by Dave Stanaway and Susan Askwith; they graciously granted permission to use this song here to bring Schoolcraft's poetry to an ever wider audience.  ** "Sweet Willy, My Boy · Dave Stanaway and Susan Askwith · John Johnston: His Life and Times in the Fur Trade Era ℗ 2005 Dave Stanaway and Susan Askwith Released on: 2005-01-01  (Song consent to be used on "Think About It Podcast" by Dave Stanaway and Susan Askwith on November 25th, 2020 by email to Ulrich Baer) ** /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @uli.baer  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast ROBERT DALE PARKER - @robertdaleparker //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :)

Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who can pass for white in turn-of-the-century America. Forced into impossible choices created by an unjust society, the narrator describes his experiences as he travels from Jacksonville to New York City, the rural South to Paris, London, and beyond. As the first first-person novel published by an African American author, Johnson’s powerfully unsentimental story examines the significance of chance and choice, the particularly American investment in self-invention, and the role of identities seized and forced upon us in shaping our lives. Its influence extends to Richard Wright, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man and even Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American writer, diplomat, musician, public intellectual, and civil rights leader. The first African American executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, he was known for his poetry, novels, anthologies, and editorial writings. With his brother James Rosamond Johnson, he wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing," now known as the Black National Anthem (Beyoncé's 2018 Coachella rendition is here). From 1906 to 1913 he served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1934 he became New York University’s first African American professor and in 1931 was appointed the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He firmly believed that art and literature matter as much as laws, court victories, and social movements in fighting racial injustice and inequality. He died in an automobile accident in 1938.  I spoke with Professor Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus of the University of Southern California about Johnson's novel, and also about the post-Civil War era in African American literature, up to the Harlem Renaissance, when writers used the genre of the novel to imagine new forms of representation -- for themselves and for America. Daniels-Rauterkus's fantastic book, Afro-Realisms & the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), reveals that African Americans wrote works of literary realism, and that white realists made contributions to African American literature. We also talked about the haunting ending of Johnson's novel: "I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of potage.” /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast MELISSA DANIELS-RAUTERKUS - @dr.mrauterkus // (FACEBOOK) //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :)

Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who can pass for white in turn-of-the-century America. Forced into impossible choices created by an unjust society, the narrator describes his experiences as he travels from Jacksonville to New York City, the rural South to Paris, London, and beyond. As the first first-person novel published by an African American author, Johnson’s powerfully unsentimental story examines the significance of chance and choice, the particularly American investment in self-invention, and the role of identities seized and forced upon us in shaping our lives. Its influence extends to Richard Wright, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man and even Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American writer, diplomat, musician, public intellectual, and civil rights leader. The first African American executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, he was known for his poetry, novels, anthologies, and editorial writings. With his brother James Rosamond Johnson, he wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing," now known as the Black National Anthem (Beyoncé's 2018 Coachella rendition is here). From 1906 to 1913 he served as President Theodore Roosevelt’s U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1934 he became New York University’s first African American professor and in 1931 was appointed the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He firmly believed that art and literature matter as much as laws, court victories, and social movements in fighting racial injustice and inequality. He died in an automobile accident in 1938.  I spoke with Professor Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus of the University of Southern California about Johnson's novel, and also about the post-Civil War era in African American literature, up to the Harlem Renaissance, when writers used the genre of the novel to imagine new forms of representation -- for themselves and for America. Daniels-Rauterkus's fantastic book, Afro-Realisms & the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), reveals that African Americans wrote works of literary realism, and that white realists made contributions to African American literature. We also talked about the haunting ending of Johnson's novel: "I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of potage.” /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast MELISSA DANIELS-RAUTERKUS - @dr.mrauterkus // (FACEBOOK) //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :)

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary," is the line many remember from middle or high school, or a Simpsons episode. It's the opening of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" which flutters not only though America's collective unconscious but is celebrated in Europe, Latin America and Asia as one of the great achievements of American culture. The inventor of the detective story, teller of thrilling and enthralling tales of terror, and progenitor to Hitchcock, Stephen King and much of Netflix's programing, Poe deserves to be understood. I spoke with one of the great experts on Poe, Professor J. Gerald Kennedy at Louisiana State University who's written award-winning books on Poe in American culture. Professor Kennedy very movingly told me about the connection to his late grandfather via Poe, why he considers Poe to be so important, and how to understand Toni Morrison's famous declaration that Poe is key to understanding American writers' use of Black characters in their construction of the white mythology of American culture. /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :)

Something different today: I was lucky to speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker, published September 2020 by New Directions books. It's a spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher's house museum filled with his collection of objects, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum's caretaker. In our conversation, Doon and I discussed the idea that objects carry their own histories with them, how we behave in museums, and whether it's necessary to carefully curate or, perhaps, to completely destroy a biography in order to appreciate an artist's or writer's work.  If you're interested, for the audio book the amazing Alan Cummings lends his voice to Doon Arbus's book in the  audio version of The Caretaker. /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :)

Something different today: I was lucky to speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker, published September 2020 by New Directions books. It's a spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher's house museum filled with his collection of objects, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum's caretaker. In our conversation, Doon and I discussed the idea that objects carry their own histories with them, how we behave in museums, and whether it's necessary to carefully curate or, perhaps, to completely destroy a biography in order to appreciate an artist's or writer's work.  If you're interested, for the audio book the amazing Alan Cummings lends his voice to Doon Arbus's book in the  audio version of The Caretaker.

Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the great love stories of all time, but it's also the story of a woman who speaks her truth even when this means risking everything she wants. Jane, an orphan raised in a cruel family and struggling to survive in a world where poor women have few chances, falls in love with dashing and mysterious Mr. Rochester, the owner of the estate where she finds a job. A secret in his part forces Jane to chose between compromising her integrity or giving up on him, until dramatic circumstances and her courageous choices change her fate. Do we have to give up autonomy and freedom when we fall in love? Jane Eyre provides the cultural script we still follow today, in every rom-com movie, reality dating show and also high-brow novels that explore the vagaries of our hearts. I spoke with Professor Susan Ostrov Weisser, an expert not only on Jane Eyre but also on this cultural script of romance for women, where a young girl's life goal is supposed to become both independent yet also attached to a man. I asked her whether falling in love means giving up one's freedom, how to make sense of the "madwoman in the attic," to whom novelist Jean Rhys famously gave voice in her book, Wide Sargasso Sea, and whether Jane Eyre is really a feminist book. Has the script changed by now?  Susan Ostrov Weisser is Professor of English at Adelphi University and the author of: The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories Rutgers U. Press (20130; Women and Romance (ed.), New York University Press (2001); A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880 (1997); and with co-editor Jennifer Fleischner,  Feminist Nightmares: Women At Odds (1994). /////////////// Follow us: TWITTER - @ulibaer  INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc  (THINK ABOUT IT PODCAST) - @thinkaboutit.podcast //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer  //////////////// Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

Marx has never left us. In our era of populism, political polarization, and the pandemic, concerns central to Marx such as economic inequality, the consolidation of power in the hands of the few, and the fate of workers - whether officially designated as essential yet treated, exactly, how? - are urgently discussed. How should we think about Marx today? I spoke with Professor Vivek Chibber at NYU. Vivek is a social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology who has published Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013), and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, 2003) and numerous articles and essays. In 2017, Chibber launched Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, with Robert Brenner, published by Jacobin magazine. We met in a recording studio in New York City, so this audio podcast is also available in a video version on YouTube. /////////////// Follow me: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/UliBaer (THINK ABOUT IT) - https://twitter.com/ulibaerpodcast NSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ulinyc/ (THINK ABOUT IT) - https://www.instagram.com/ulibaerpodc... //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/think-about-it/id1438358902 SPOTIFY - https://open.spotify.com/show/3QDjymXla0Lt61r2OaWEtV //////////////// Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the novel that scandalized, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth. Dorian wants to experience life fully, and the book became evidence in the trial where Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for "gross indecency" - his love for other men. Wilde had been the consummate celebrity, famous for his plays, especially the sublime The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan, but also as a public speaker who had entertained and charmed audiences during an American tour. After his prison term Wilde left England for exile in France. It was not only Wilde on trial, but also literature itself. British society decided was that a book can corrupt, that gay love must be outlawed, and that censorship, repression and propriety must supplant freedom of the imagination, of literature, of love. Martyr, scapegoat, crusader for LGBTQ rights - that was my understanding of Wilde when I recently edited a small book of Wilde on Love. To correct my image of Wilde as utterly crushed and destroyed by his trial, I spoke with one of the world's foremost Wilde experts: Professor Nicholas Frankel of Virginia Commonwealth University, a graduate of Oxford, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia. Professor Frankel has edited new and uncensored editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray, of The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest, and of his prison writings. His expansive and gripping biography, Oscar Wilde; The Unrepentant Years, provides a much fuller picture of Wilde than previous biographies and lets us see how one of the first true celebrities who knew how to deploy his image like the best of today's internet influencers, changed the way we live in the world. Listen to this episode not only during Pride Month (when I recorded this episode, via zoom during the lockdown) but to re-discover one of the most transformative novels in the English canon.  /////////////// Follow me: TWITTER - @ulibaer (THINK ABOUT IT) - @ulibaerpodcast INSTAGRAM - @ulinyc (THINK ABOUT IT) - @ulibaerpodcast //////////////// Listen to the Podcast on: APPLE PODCASTS - Think About It Podcast SPOTIFY - Think About It Podcast YOUTUBE: Ulrich Baer //////////////// Thanks for listening! :) Uli Baer.

“The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all.” This is Brenda Wineapple on the friendship of Emily Dickinson, in my view America's greatest poet, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor, writer, abolitionist, activist, and soldier. During this time of a global lockdown, let's listen to Dickinson again.  I spoke with Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about Dickinson's remarkable assuredness, her confidence, and her decision to spend much of her life largely secluded in her father's home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In this self-elected state of being on her own, Dickinson had intense, passionate and transformative relationships, including one with the editor, writer, abolitionist and soldier Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "Are you too preoccupied to say whether my verse is alive?" was the question Dickinson laid out like a snare in her first letter to him.  Higginson fell for this brilliant rhetorical ruse, and Brenda explains how Dickinson's remarkable friendship with a man whom academics like to relegate to the dustbin of history, or at best footnote status, is a major reason Dickinson's poetry is with us today. Brenda also explains how America has always struggled with the choice between separateness and connection, and how to understand Dickinson not as the spinster from Amherst, the victim of the patriarchy, or a forlorn recluse but as a superbly confident and self-assured poet. "To be alive is power,/ existence in itself,/ Without a further function,/ Omnipotence enough." Brenda is the author of a number of books, including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,  Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, and more . I recorded this conversation while in Covid-19 lockdown. The poems here are read by Anna Kathryn Kendrick.   

Why is everyone talking about Michel Foucault these days? How can Foucault's work have so many resonances in our contemporary world? What were his insights and discoveries that have influenced disciplines as diverse as cultural studies, gender and queer studies, or post-colonial studies? There is no doubt that Michel Foucault was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His work —always critical— between philosophy and history, resists easy labels. Some regard him as a historian of knowledge, while others think he is a philosopher. He thought of his own method as genealogy, and I wanted to understand what this means. His celebrated four-volume work History of Sexuality, published between 1978 and 2018 —the final volume posthumously— and his conferences in the Collège de France —among others— are fundamental to understand how concepts such as knowledge, power, gender, sexuality, desire and affect are not neutral but culturally and historically determined. Our guest today was able to attend some of Foucault's conferences in Paris. Ann Stoler is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. In this new episode, I talked with Ann about her first encounter with the work of the French philosopher to better understand some key points of his investigations. How can we think of "truth" as something historically and culturally specific, rather than an absolute, unending value. I learned how Foucault's investigations influenced Ann Stoler's pathbreaking work on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and the ethnography of the archives.

"It is impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West. -- Yes, everyone knew that, except the dead." Albert Camus's world-famous 1947 novel The Plague is about the human response to extreme circumstances. For a long time the book was read as an allegory of people resisting fascism, but the plague never quite stays only a metaphor in Camus's book. His chronicle of a town's response to a frightening, invisible enemy, from initial denial, then gradual realization and finally the lockdown that traps the citizens with nowhere to go but in a full-fledged panic, can leave you in a cold sweat.  Why read such a book today, during the global Covid-19 pandemic?  I spoke with Caroline Weber, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College within Columbia University and an expert on French literature and culture. Caroline and I discussed how brilliantly Camus shows the wide range of human responses to extreme conditions, and how literature provides a model for making sense of and getting though our current crisis- of living in a pandemic- without losing hope or our humanity. In their initial denial of the plague, "our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences." But gradually several characters find ways of creating meaning in the midst of a senseless and absolutely brutal assault not only on their town but on their very humanity. In his Novel Prize acceptance speech in 1957, four years before his untimely death at age 45 in a car accident, Camus said a writer "cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it."  The Plague, written from the perspective of someone who makes the deliberate choice to help in concrete ways but also to record the suffering of those around him, allows us to see how to make sense of our current, difficult moment. Camus was no optimist, but like his protagonist Rieux, he considered it his inalterable obligation "to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” Let's hope that books such as Camus's courageous and bold work may inspire some of us to do the same, and see more things to admire in others than to despise.

Why read books in dark times? Daniel Defoe, known to most as the author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, about the plague that decimated London's population in 1665. The gripping account is presented as a survivor's story who confronts his world being ravaged by an invisible and extremely contagious disease. But Defoe survived the plague as a five-year-old by leaving London. The book he published some fifty years later is a fictional recreation of a period when most certainties and routines held dear by Londoners crumbled around them. Why did people not heed the first warnings and prepare better? How did they behave once the pandemic devastated neighboring parishes? Did the crisis bring out the best in people? And how did Defoe's narrator account for his choice to stay in the city when he had the chance to escape, only to realize that protecting his property was a vain concern when faced with imminent and gruesome death all around him.  Why read such a book right now, during the COVID-19 global pandemic? Jenny Davidson, a literary scholar, novelist and extreme athlete, is an expert on Defoe and novels in general. She explained how reading fiction can give us the experience of deepened time destroyed by a 24-hour cycle of catastrophic news, how reading can be an escape into a quieter yet deeper state of mind, and why Defoe's book is not only a brilliant historical document but ushers in the genre of the novel we take for granted today.  I personally was inspired and uplifted by this conversation with Jenny, after reading Defoe's Journal twice in a week. The book allowed me to process the jumble of panic, denial, fear, frustration, confusion, anger, sadness, and paralyzing mania that has gripped me for weeks now. By reading Defoe's incredibly vivid description of people's responses to the plague, I could cycle through these responses via another setting, and thus let my brain and heart come to rest for a moment. Jenny explained why reading creates this space of deeper quiet for our mind.  We ended the conversation with suggestions of what to read now that so many listeners are in quarantine: books that will let you escape reality without denying it, and give you a sense of being in the world while the world as we know it falls apart around us.  Jenny Davidson is a Professor of English and American literature at Columbia University in New York City. A voracious reader, novelist, and brilliant scholar, she is the author of four novels, several books of literary scholarship and an avid blogger. She also competes in ultra-marathons, triathlons, and all sorts of other completely astonishing athletic competitions. 

Immanuel Kant's short 1784 essay, "What is Enlightenment?" clearly lays out what the Age of Reason means: that we are encouraged to think for ourselves to claim our freedom. What, precisely, does it mean to think for oneself? Should that not be just natural and intuitive, rather than something we need to learn?  I spoke with one of the great experts on Kant's philosophy, Professor Béatrice Longuenesse of NYU and the author of Kant and the Capacity to Judge, and the wonderful philosophical inquiry, I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again, to understand what Kant means when he says that we can be taught to think for ourselves, and what Kant, usually credited with ushering in modern philosophy, did for thinking in general.  

Should professors be held accountable for speech they make off-campus, on-line, and apart from their professional role in the university? Does academic freedom mean freedom of speech (it does not), and what are the crucial differences? I spoke with Professor Henry Reichman, who has served as Vice President of the American Association of University Professor, a prestigious organization that defends (and explains) academic freedom for now over 100 years. Professor Reichman has chaired the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and just published a lucid book on these issues called The Future of Academic Freedom. He believes that we must not take academic freedom for granted, and that the time is now to explain it, stand up for it, defend it.

Being arrested without ever being told why, or waking up to discover one has been transformed into a giant insect: these are the powerful images we have of Franz Kafka, a writer of existential despair who embarked on a futile quest for meaning in the 20th century. Vivian Liska, a widely published Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, explains how Kafka is actually a writer of human connection who shows that we can create the fragile bonds needed to sustain community. Liska calls Kafka a writer of exquisite faith in the human capacity of community and renewal, a champion of humor instead of despair, and a man of faith who foregoes all formal religion.  Among Liska’s books are When Kafka Says We, Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature and German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife.

A recent legal case about affirmative action was decided in favor of Harvard University's holistic admission practices. Is the fight over affirmative action over now? Not quite, explains Professor Chin, at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC. As a researcher whose expertise is immigration, family, work, education, Asian Americans, and children of immigrants, Professor Chin explains what the legal ruling means for higher education, for the future of affirmative action, and for students, faculty and anyone who believes in equality of opportunity in our country. Professor Chin is Professor Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She is also a graduate of Harvard College, and she talked with me about her experience of being recruited as a New York City high school student from a poor immigrant community into one of America's premier universities -- and what that experience has taught her. 

In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture that Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of our modern Supreme Court, called America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence. What does it mean for America, and us as Americans, to start thinking for ourselves? What does it mean to start our intellectual break from Europe nearly half a century after the American Revolution - and what new forms of living can be envisioned now? Emerson remains the great American philosopher whose essays are far more radical, incisive and important than you would believe when encountering them in high school. I spoke with Eduardo Cadava, Professor at Princeton University and an expert in Emerson, American literature, philosophy, and photography to learn what is distinctly American about Emerson's writing. How do think as Americans, and how do we speak English in truly new ways? 

Jean Toomer’s 1923 Cane is one of America’s literary masterpieces: a book that captures the dynamism and rhythm of American English through characters that could not exist anywhere else in the world. The short novel is comprised of stories, tales, poetry and even songs, and in breaking with conventional genre it also broke with assumptions of who and what a book of modernist writing can feature. As a person who identified himself as the first “true American,” Toomer was educated in both black and white schools the 1920s. For a while he lived in Georgia where Cane is set, peopled by African-Americans and whites who are living through the volatile, gorgeous and violent reality structured by but not entirely determined by our country’s troubled race relations. But Cane is not a sociological treatise on race relations but as Ismail Muhammad explains, a book that resists and upends such interpretations. Toomer was furious when Cane was first marketed as a book by and about the African-American experience. While Toomer considered Cane the "swan song" of African-American folk culture rapidly destroyed by the industrialization of the South and the north-bound migration of African Americans during the era of Jim Crow, he did not want the book to be read only as a book about African-Americans. As Ismail Muhammad explains in an essay for the Paris Review, "far from being a book that [...] is intended to transcend blackness, Cane is the site where Toomer most artfully theorizes a surprisingly contemporary notion of what blackness means." I spoke with writer and critic Ismail Muhammad to understand why Toomer’s single published book ranks among the great masterpieces of modernism, how to read a book celebrated as a major achievement of the Harlem renaissance without pigeonholing and limiting its ambition, scope and achievement, and what Toomer's notion of "what blackness means" is so relevant back then and still today. 

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!) if society is made by us and for us? Why does it seem that modern human beings are not liberated but in fact subjugate themselves voluntarily to a system that robs them off their freedom? Rousseau's thought has informed much of modern political theory and philosophy and inspired people everywhere to think about the balance between individual liberty and collective existence. In order to understand better the lasting influence of Rousseau and his current significance, I spoke with Melissa Schwartzberg, who is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a specialist in political theory. Melissa's research is in the historical origins and normative logic of democratic institutions. This means she examines the principles underlying democracies and also the way democratic practices, from constitutions to elections, work out today. Professor Schwartzberg is the author of several books: Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule, and Democracy and Change.   

Led by Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, a generation of young people are ready for swift and commensurate action on climate change. Are their parents and grandparents morally obligated to listen? Philosopher Dale Jamison explains the morality of fighting for our lives when we are not directly impacted. In conversation with Uli Baer, Dale Jamieson details a new way of thinking about climate change. When leaders and activists call Climate Change an “existential threat” what does that in fact mean? Climate Change while rooted in science is first a political problem, a philosophical problem and at its core a moral problem. Dale Jamieson is a professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at NYU School of Law. Jamieson is not a scientist himself, but early on he found himself surrounded by alarmed scientists. "Falling in with climate monitors is like falling in with people who do Tai-Chi,” he says. Convinced of the totality of climate change, Jamieson addresses the threat with the lens of a philosopher. Climate change is a recognition that rationalism is, in fact, not the guiding principle of international politics; it is both a threat and a contributor to our identity. Jamieson explores this in his newest book Discerning Experts. In the quest to address Climate Change, Jamieson calls for moral solutions. It will be the job of storytellers and connectors to address the threat. “It’s a matter of sincerity” (39:46). In a world where irony is lauded, and value systems are chastised, how can we battle climate change? As Jamieson says “We are eventually going to die, but hopefully not from some stupidity we engage in” (44:57).

How can the German response to the Holocaust teach us about America's legacy of the Confederacy? Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum and author of many books, including the recent "Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil", suggests that it's a way into talking about American racial politics and potentially a way forward. Susan Newman, a philosopher and leading thinker on evil and modern thought, probes this question in her new book. She offered us a detailed account of how both East and West Germany dealt with the Nazi past in the postwar decades, and how we may learn from these two different countries' approaches to a painful and challenging legacy. The second part of the book is devoted to discussing the legacies of racism and slavery in the United States. Neiman does not imply that there is an equivalency between slavery and the genocide committed by the Germans. The point is not to create an analogy, but to see whether learning from these examples can teach us something about living in the present

"Another heavenly day" is the opening line of Beckett's play Happy Days, where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her... but language, memory and consciousness are not all she has. Beckett's plays, novels, poetry, radio plays and prose reveal our deepest humanity by stripping language to its bare essentials. Beckett wrote some of his works in French, a language he learned mostly as an adult, and translated it back into his native English to purge it of clichés and stock phrases. In the resulting works he reveals how our bodies moving through space are far more than vessels for a roving consciousness. They contain a hint of transcendence which manifests itself as the human need for self-expression through which we locate ourselves in time, in relation to others, and in relation to ourselves.    I spoke with Beckett expert, scholar and theater director Nick Johnson at the Samuel Beckett Theatre at Trinity College Dublin, where Beckett taught for a short time in the 1920s before giving up on academia, moving to Paris, and becoming a writer next to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and others. Our conversation shows how Beckett's work is surprisingly optimistic about the power of art and language to give us meaning. "You can't go on, I must go on, I'll go on" is the final line of Beckett's novel The Unnameable. Nick explained how these words show Beckett's relentless commitment to strip our existence down to the basics (who we are, what we have, what we want) and then move deeper from there. Instead of adding more words and complexity, Beckett shows that our searching may be our life's meaning and that not knowing what we want is in fact the key to knowing ourselves. "You have to pay attention and be as informed as possible, you have to try to understand things, and you have to speak out!" is Nick's summary of what Beckett's works mean for him. In a time of historic and political turmoil, it's an urgent imperative and we would do well to heed it.  

Free speech and academic freedom are the lifeblood of universities, but in isolation these principles can lead to deadlocked situations due to conflicting values. Robert Quinn, Director of the international NGO and network Scholars at Risk which advocates for academic freedom and assists scholars persecuted for their views, offers a values frame that touches on five core principles for universities. Academic freedom, equitable access, accountability, autonomy and social responsibility must work together to make the university distinct from 'the street.' Universities are revolutionary projects, Rob explains, because they sanction a space in society for genuine questioning and critique of the status quo with the goal of better outcomes. Scholars at Risk advocates for, monitors and defends academic freedom around the world -- and hopes to shift situations from death sentences, attacks, assassinations, harassment and lawsuits to a productive conversation of the value of free thought. 

We Americans are defined by our Constitution and we cherish especially the First and Second Amendments. But like all texts, the Constitution can be read to empower and protect our individual rights, but it can also be used selectively, self-servingly, and in bad faith. And the Constitution guarantees two things: our own personal liberties, unfettered by threats from the government, and equal treatment before the law. So is online harassment, assault weapons in every hand, and hate speech the price we all pay for the freedoms we enjoy? Or is is the price that certain people pay and others don't?  Professor Mary Anne Franks is an expert on the First and Second Amendments and the author of several legislative bills that now govern the nonconsensual pictures of intimacy distributed online (also called "revenge porn"). She asks whether our country's faith and belief in the Constitution amounts to something like a cult, where unquestioning belief is expected of the many while a small elite decides which rights matter to whom, and who has to pay the price for other people's liberty. Professor Franks maintains that our commitment to the rule of law is now more important than even before, and that such a commitment requires a critical and intelligent reading of the Constitution, rather than blind faith.  We also discussed why so many white men claim that they are victims of censorship and free speech suppression when internet platforms decline to host them, and why this argument of who is more oppressed ends up evading the tougher questions of how the Amendments work in the real world. Are disputes over the Amendments really solved with more guns, more speech, more internet? Or are there better ways of countering real-world violence, harassment, inequality, and threats?

America embodies the bold promise of assuring everyone's liberty to the greatest extent possible - and it also has a history of exercising its power both internally and around the globe with great force. How can we make sense of this dual promise, of personal liberation and rights for all, and of an expansionist idea the imposes the will and power of America on populations it seeks to dominate? I spoke with Professor Aziz Rana, of Cornell University's Law school, about this tension at the heart of the American promise. With a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale, Professor Rana is uniquely equipped to untangle the legal and political dynamics that shape the American experiment, and to test how it plays out for people both here in the US and around the world. We also talked about his more recent project about Americans' veneration for the Constitution - and whether this reverential attitude toward our foundational legal document is truly in the interest of the Founders and of ourselves.