Think About It

I speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker. It's a spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher's house museum filled with stuff, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum's caretaker. 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 or curate or, perhaps, to completely destroy a biography in order to appreciate an artist's or writer's work.

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).

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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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 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).

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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Oscar 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 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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I 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 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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Is "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.

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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Novel laureate Albert Camus's 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. I spoke with Caroline Weber, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College to discuss how brilliantly Camus shows the wide range of human responses to extreme conditions, and how literature provides a model for getting through our current crisis.

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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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. 

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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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. 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 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, 

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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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 and what are the differences? I spoke with Professor Henry Reichman, who has served as Vice President of the American Association of University Professor, an organization that defends academic freedom. Reichman has chaired the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and just published The Future of Academic Freedom.

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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