Think About It
251 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 months ago - ★★★★★ - 56 ratingsThink About It engages today's leading thinkers in conversations about powerful ideas and how language can change the world.
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Episodes
Book Talk 61: Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H.L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesA 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 ...
Book Talk 60: Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"
May 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourCelebrated, 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 H...
Free Speech 69: Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourState 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 ...
Book Talk 59: Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich
May 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy 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 ...
Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat 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...
Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourVirginia 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, ...
Book Talk 56: Roosevelt Montás on "Great Books"
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourRoosevelt 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 undergraduat...
Book Talk 55: Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHannah 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 ...
Book Talk 54: Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"
August 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHalfway 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 pe...
Book Talk 53: Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark"
June 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToni 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 – ...
Book Talk 52: Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
May 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhen 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]he...
Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSecretly 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 an...
Book Talk 50: John Waters on James Joyce's "Dubliners"
January 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourJames 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 lef...
Book Talk 49: “The Good Life” with Dora Zhang
December 06, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour“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. S...
Book Talk 48: Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke
November 19, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourCharlie 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 huma...
BOOK TALK 48: The American Canon, with Sarah Rivett
September 19, 2021 05:09 - 59 minutes - 54.7 MBWhere, 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 in...
BOOK TALK 47: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with Wendy Lee
September 01, 2021 20:52 - 1 hour - 73.6 MBJane 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 co...
Book Talk 47: Wendy Lee on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
September 01, 2021 20:52 - 1 hourJane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice delights, charms and entrances reader since its anonymous publication in 1813. The Bennett sisters need to marry rich, for otherwise they'll fall into poverty and social disgrace. I talked with one of the great Austen experts of our time, Professor Wendy Lee of New York University, who has published widely on Austen, including in Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (Stanford UP). Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Pro...
BOOK TALK 46: HAITIAN REVOLUTION IN LITERATURE, with Marlene Daut (University of Virginia)
May 27, 2021 19:38 - 1 hour - 119 MBTo 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 H...
Book Talk 46: Marlene Daut on the Haitian Revolution in Literature
May 27, 2021 19:38 - 1 hourTo 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 Hu...
BOOK TALK 45: Martin Buber's I AND THOU, with Paul Mendes-Flohr (University of Chicago and Hebrew University in Jerusalem)
May 02, 2021 19:21 - 1 hour - 92.9 MBToday 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 atomi...
Book Talk 45: Paul Mendes-Flohr on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"
May 02, 2021 19:21 - 1 hourToday 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 atomis...
BOOK TALK 44: HANNAH ARENDT by Samantha Hill (Assist. Director "Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities" | Professor of Politics Bard College, New York State)
March 18, 2021 21:13 - 1 hour - 115 MBHannah 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...
Book Talk 44: Samantha Hill on Hannah Arendt
March 18, 2021 21:13 - 1 hourHannah 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 ...
BOOK TALK 43: RAINER MARIA RILKE by Mark Wunderlich (Poet/Writer/Teacher & Director of Creative Writing at Bennington College, Vermont)
February 19, 2021 21:08 - 1 hour - 136 MB"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 greate...
Book Talk 43: Mark Wunderlich on Rainer Maria Rilke
February 19, 2021 21:08 - 1 hour"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...
BOOK TALK 42: Kate Chopin's The Awakening, with Rafael Walker (Baruch College, CUNY)
February 01, 2021 00:30 - 1 hour - 126 MBKate 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....
Book Talk 42: Rafael Walker on Kate Chopin's "The Awakening"
February 01, 2021 00:30 - 1 hourKate 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. ...
GREAT BOOKS 41: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with John Collins (Founding Artistic Director of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company)
January 24, 2021 22:04 - 1 hour - 122 MBThe 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 en...
Great Books 41: John Collins on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
January 24, 2021 22:04 - 1 hourThe 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 end...
GREAT BOOKS 40: Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance, with Mary Chapman (University Of British Columbia)
December 28, 2020 20:21 - 1 hour - 119 MBWho 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, ...
Great Books 40: Mary Chapman on Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"
December 28, 2020 20:21 - 1 hourThe first Asian American writer to publish stories in the US, Sui Sin Far could have “passed” for a white woman but during a time of intense Sinophobia, aligned herself with Chinese Americans. I spoke with one of the great experts on Sui Sin Far, Professor Mary Chapman, at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing , who also directs a crucial website: https://www.winnifredeatonarchive.org/ Uli Bae...
GREAT BOOKS 39: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, with Robert Dale Parker (University of Illinois)
November 25, 2020 23:30 - 1 hour - 120 MBJane 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 Ameri...
Great Books 39: Robert Dale Parker on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
November 25, 2020 23:30 - 1 hourJane 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 Americ...
GREAT BOOKS 38: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, with Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus (University of Southern California)
November 20, 2020 19:12 - 1 hour - 60 MBRecalling 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 Ci...
Great Books 38: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
November 20, 2020 19:12 - 1 hourRecalling 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 Cit...
GREAT BOOKS 37: Edgar Allan Poe, with J. Gerald Kennedy (Louisiana State University)
October 01, 2020 19:38 - 1 hour - 71 MB"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 Ki...
Great Books 37: J. Gerald Kennedy on Edgar Allan Poe
October 01, 2020 19:38 - 1 hourTo understand Poe, inventor of the detective story, tales of terror, and progenitor to Hitchcock, Stephen King and much of Netflix's programing, I spoke with J. Gerald Kennedy who's written award-winning books on Poe in American culture. I asked Professor Kennedy about his favorite stories 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. Uli Bae...
GREAT BOOKS 36: Doon Arbus's The Caretaker, with Doon Arbus
September 24, 2020 19:57 - 51 minutes - 58.7 MBSomething 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'...
Great Books 36: Doon Arbus's "The Caretaker"
September 24, 2020 19:57 - 53 minutesSomething 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...
GREAT BOOKS 35: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, with Susan Weisser (Adelphi University)
August 27, 2020 19:08 - 1 hour - 103 MBCharlotte 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...
Great Books 35: Susan Weisser on Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
August 27, 2020 19:08 - 1 hourCharlotte 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 ...
GREAT BOOKS 34: Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, with Vivek Chibber (NYU)
July 24, 2020 17:15 - 59 minutes - 81.2 MBMarx 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 ...
Great Books 34: Vivek Chibber on Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto"
July 24, 2020 17:15 - 1 hourMarx 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 are urgently discussed. How should we think about Marx today? I spoke with Professor Vivek Chibber at NYU 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). ...
GREAT BOOKS 33: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Nicholas Frankel (Virginia Commonwealth University)
June 16, 2020 21:19 - 1 hour - 67 MBOscar 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 Impor...
Great Books 33: Nicholas Frankel on Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
June 16, 2020 21:19 - 1 hourOscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the novel that shocked, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth. I spoke with Professor Nicholas Frankel of Virginia Commonwealth University, whose biography Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, to see how one of the first true celebrities and his only novel changed the way we live in the world today. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography a...
GREAT BOOK 32: Emily Dickinson: Isolation and Intervention, with Brenda Wineapple
May 12, 2020 02:22 - 1 hour - 82.6 MB“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 Higginso...
Great Books 32: Brenda Wineapple on Emily Dickinson--Isolation and Intervention
May 12, 2020 02:22 - 1 hourI spoke with Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat, about Dickinson's remarkable assuredness, her confidence, and her decision to spend much of her life secluded in her father's home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In this 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?", she asked. He wasn't. Uli Bae...
GREAT BOOKS 31: Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault, with Ann Stoler
May 07, 2020 03:18 - 1 hour - 78.6 MBWhy 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 knowledg...
Great Books 31: Ann Stoler on Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault
May 07, 2020 03:18 - 1 hourIs "truth" a historical construct? Michel Foucault's work investigates this and other concepts. I spoke with Ann Stoler of NYC's New School for Social Research about Foucault to understand his investigations. How can we think of "truth" as something historically and culturally specific, rather than an absolute, unending value? Stoler's pathbreaking work on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and the ethnography of the archives....