Think About It

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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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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.

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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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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“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.

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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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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Where, when, and how does American literature begin? What is the canon of U.S. literature, and how is it distinct? Why is it so important which authors are shared knowledge among all Americans? I spoke with Sarah Rivett, who is Professor of English & American Studies, and Affiliated Faculty of Indigenous Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England and, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of  Literary Nation.

Jane 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 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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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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..

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 [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer.

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