WFHB

In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very real economic prosperity being experienced by the growing numbers of the so-called “middle class.” Anxiety and Supremacy yielded a national double-consciousness: While the clarion called for progress, the bell tolled against difference. And along with a fear of homosexuality and communism, those so-called lavender and red menaces, there was a fear that an educated woman might destroy the Great American Family. I’m not sure what color feminism is.

One such “dangerous experiment” in women’s liberation was the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a program that offered paid fellowships to women with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement.

In her book, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, published by Knopf, Maggie Doherty, tells the story of how five women who received fellowships–poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen–formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.”

The fulcrum of the book is Anne Sexton who shot to fame during her time at the Institute. Sexton believed she should be committed to home and hearth, husband and children, and yet everything about domesticity frustrated her ambitions. In her poem “Housewife,” she writes,

Some women marry houses.

It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That’s the main thing.

Sexton wanted to achieve literary greatness in what was (and is) demonstrably a man’s world. The Institute would give her what she needed to be a great poet: time and friendship; a room and community of her own.

We begin with the founder of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Mary Ingraham Bunting, scientist, wife, and mother of four who perhaps assumed that her life was a useful model for women to replicate. But “the Equivalents,” especially Sexton and Tillie Olsen, radicalized the notion of what all kinds of women might want for a fulfilling life beyond the idealized family.

All of our music for the show comes from jazz pianist Jutta Hipp. Born in 1925 in Germany, Jutta Hipp studied painting and listened to jazz in secret, as it was not approved of by the Nazi authorities. After the war she became a touring pianist to support herself. She moved to New York in 1955 and played at the Hickory House in 1956 where she recorded two albums for Blue Note. A studio album with Zoot Sims followed in July of the same year and was her final recording. She dropped out of music, returned to painting, and worked as a seamstress for thirty-five years. She died in Queens in 2003.

GUEST

Maggie Doherty is a literary scholar, historian, and critic based at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English and where she currently teaches writing, literature, and history. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, n+1, and The Nation. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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The Creative Communities That Changed Literature Forever by Maggie Doherty

A Room of One’s Ow...

In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very real economic prosperity being experienced by the growing numbers of the so-called “middle class.” Anxiety and Supremacy yielded a national double-consciousness: While the clarion called for progress, the bell tolled against difference. And along with a fear of homosexuality and communism, those so-called lavender and red menaces, there was a fear that an educated woman might destroy the Great American Family. I’m not sure what color feminism is.

One such “dangerous experiment” in women’s liberation was the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a program that offered paid fellowships to women with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement.

In her book, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, published by Knopf, Maggie Doherty, tells the story of how five women who received fellowships–poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen–formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.”

The fulcrum of the book is Anne Sexton who shot to fame during her time at the Institute. Sexton believed she should be committed to home and hearth, husband and children, and yet everything about domesticity frustrated her ambitions. In her poem "Housewife," she writes,

Some women marry houses.

It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That's the main thing.

Sexton wanted to achieve literary greatness in what was (and is) demonstrably a man’s world. The Institute would give her what she needed to be a great poet: time and friendship; a room and community of her own.

We begin with the founder of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Mary Ingraham Bunting, scientist, wife, and mother of four who perhaps assumed that her life was a useful model for women to replicate. But “the Equivalents,” especially Sexton and Tillie Olsen, radicalized the notion of what all kinds of women might want for a fulfilling life beyond the idealized family.

All of our music for the show comes from jazz pianist Jutta Hipp. Born in 1925 in Germany, Jutta Hipp studied painting and listened to jazz in secret, as it was not approved of by the Nazi authorities. After the war she became a touring pianist to support herself. She moved to New York in 1955 and played at the Hickory House in 1956 where she recorded two albums for Blue Note. A studio album with Zoot Sims followed in July of the same year and was her final recording. She dropped out of music, returned to painting, and worked as a seamstress for thirty-five years. She died in Queens in 2003.

GUEST

Maggie Doherty is a literary scholar, historian, and critic based at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English and where she currently teaches writing, literature, and history. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, n+1, and The Nation. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

RELATED

The Creative Communities That Changed Literature Forever by Maggie Doherty

We’re not talking about the mind today, but of internment, and ghettos, of settlement camps.

Today’s conversation focuses on the history and origins of concentration, a form of biopolitics that seeks to manage and structure the movement of social groups in a predictable manner. Modern forms of concentration have become a nearly ubiquitous force of social structuring: from mass incarceration in the United States to the confinement of refugees in settlement camps the world over, we can see the logic of concentration at work. The most prevalent and commonly recognized form of concentration in modern history is that of the 20th century concentration camp, with its most brutal and horrific manifestation during the Holocaust of WWII.

Historians and theorists have often identified the origins of the concentration camp with the Cuban war for independence, when the Spanish colonial officer Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau ordered rural civilians to report to the nearest city that had a garrison of Spanish troops. This historical account suggests that Spanish colonialism in Cuba provided the condition of possibility for the concentration camp to emerge and to spread to different contexts around the world. However, our guest today, Daniel Nemser, in his book Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, raises the important question: “If (Spanish) colonialism was the camp’s condition of possibility, why would it have emerged only at the end of a long colonial project that had already endured over four centuries?”

Nemser instead extends the history of concentration back into the very beginning of Spanish colonialism in Mexico, tracing the forms that it took under the auspices of the colonial project. In doing so, he likewise shows that the colonial implementation of concentration not only produced a social order through population management, but also instituted this order through the production of race itself. Nemser looks at the various techniques of colonial governance that Spain implemented – centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – to demonstrate that race is not a pre-existing identity, but is produced and subsequently experienced through forms of population management tied to concentration.

What is most striking is that what Nemser describes of 17th century Mexico City is a mode of organization nearly unchanged over those four centuries. The colonial project of Empire is alive and well in cities in the United States. And there is something very familiar in the ways that colonizers describe and denigrate local populations.

We’ll also learn of a food riot where Spain lost control of the center of the city for one day and the methods undertaken to regain and maintain control.

Our music today comes from the 2012 album Cu Taan by Adrián Terrazas-González. Born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico, Terrazas-González is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who attended the University of Texas El Paso and now lives in Los Angeles. We’re listening to the title track.

GUEST

Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan where his research and teaching focuses on colonial history in Latin America. He is currently working on a second book that looks at colonial infrastructure tied to circulation and movement, most prominently roads and ports, and how it informs the production of race in Colonial Mexico.

RELATED

Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots

Carceral Capitalism: An Interview with Ja...

We’re not talking about the mind today, but of internment, and ghettos, of settlement camps.

Today’s conversation focuses on the history and origins of concentration, a form of biopolitics that seeks to manage and structure the movement of social groups in a predictable manner. Modern forms of concentration have become a nearly ubiquitous force of social structuring: from mass incarceration in the United States to the confinement of refugees in settlement camps the world over, we can see the logic of concentration at work. The most prevalent and commonly recognized form of concentration in modern history is that of the 20th century concentration camp, with its most brutal and horrific manifestation during the Holocaust of WWII.

Historians and theorists have often identified the origins of the concentration camp with the Cuban war for independence, when the Spanish colonial officer Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau ordered rural civilians to report to the nearest city that had a garrison of Spanish troops. This historical account suggests that Spanish colonialism in Cuba provided the condition of possibility for the concentration camp to emerge and to spread to different contexts around the world. However, our guest today, Daniel Nemser, in his book Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, raises the important question: “If (Spanish) colonialism was the camp’s condition of possibility, why would it have emerged only at the end of a long colonial project that had already endured over four centuries?”

Nemser instead extends the history of concentration back into the very beginning of Spanish colonialism in Mexico, tracing the forms that it took under the auspices of the colonial project. In doing so, he likewise shows that the colonial implementation of concentration not only produced a social order through population management, but also instituted this order through the production of race itself. Nemser looks at the various techniques of colonial governance that Spain implemented - centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections - to demonstrate that race is not a pre-existing identity, but is produced and subsequently experienced through forms of population management tied to concentration.

What is most striking is that what Nemser describes of 17th century Mexico City is a mode of organization nearly unchanged over those four centuries. The colonial project of Empire is alive and well in cities in the United States. And there is something very familiar in the ways that colonizers describe and denigrate local populations.

We’ll also learn of a food riot where Spain lost control of the center of the city for one day and the methods undertaken to regain and maintain control.

Our music today comes from the 2012 album Cu Taan by Adrián Terrazas-González. Born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico, Terrazas-González is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who attended the University of Texas El Paso and now lives in Los Angeles. We’re listening to the title track.

GUEST

Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan where his research and teaching focuses on colonial history in Latin America. He is currently working on a second book that looks at colonial infrastructure tied to circulation and movement, most prominently roads and ports, and how it informs the production of race in Colonial Mexico.

RELATED

Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots

It’s May 5th, 2020 and today we’re going to bring our interview with Joshua Clover on poetry and crisis, strikes and riots, back to your attention. This conversation took place at the end of September in 2015 when Clover was completing his Verso book Riot. Strike. Riot that would be published in May of 2016.

What recalled this conversation to us was an April 16 podcast we came across called The Geopolitics of COVID-19 and hosted by the University of California at Davis Humanities Institute. It features Clover in conversation with the great Mike Davis whose back-to-back books The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005) and Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006) really ought to be required reading at this point in capitalism’s late phase of pandemic generation.

Near the end of the conversation Clover addresses the Rent Strike that happened in April and this ties in nicely with the focus of this Interchange. We’ll begin with that slightly edited clip. (The link to the whole conversation is below.)

The work of Joshua Clover blends the worlds of poetry and economic crisis.

Clover’s book Riot. Strike. Riot explores the historical development of riots from a tactic for worker’s wage demands to post-1968 occupations challenging corporate and government malignance.

In our first segment Clover gives an overview of his work of political theory and tells us why we’re in a “new age of riot.”

But we’ll begin with a poem from Red Epic to set the tone. This is “Haecceity” a latin word which loosely translates as “thisness” and which Clover expands to mean “a particular sensual immediacy of the given thing.”

GUEST

Joshua Clover is a poet, communist, cultural critic, translator, editor, and professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. He has published three acclaimed volumes of poetry including The Totality for Kids and his most recent, Red Epic, published by Commune Editions in 2015, and a book of political theory, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings published by Verso.

RELATED

“Revolutionary Letters No. 19” Diane di Prima

DHI Conversation: The Geopolitics of COVID-19 with Mike Davis and Joshua Clover

The Year in Struggles by Joshua Clover

MUSIC

“Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” Handsome Furs

“Run This Town” Jay-Z (with Rhianna and Kanye West)

“White Riot” The Clash

“Paper Airplanes” MIA

Songs under Clover’s poems:

“Thisness” Miles Davis

“Transistor” Kraftwerk

“Duck-Rabbit” Alog

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assisted by Bella Bravo

Executive Producer: Kade Young

It’s May 5th, 2020 and today we’re going to bring our interview with Joshua Clover on poetry and crisis, strikes and riots, back to your attention. This conversation took place at the end of September in 2015 when Clover was completing his Verso book Riot. Strike. Riot that would be published in May of 2016.

What recalled this conversation to us was an April 16 podcast we came across called The Geopolitics of COVID-19 and hosted by the University of California at Davis Humanities Institute. It features Clover in conversation with the great Mike Davis whose back-to-back books The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005) and Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006) really ought to be required reading at this point in capitalism’s late phase of pandemic generation.

Near the end of the conversation Clover addresses the Rent Strike that happened in April and this ties in nicely with the focus of this Interchange. We’ll begin with that slightly edited clip. (The link to the whole conversation is below.)

The work of Joshua Clover blends the worlds of poetry and economic crisis.

Clover’s book Riot. Strike. Riot explores the historical development of riots from a tactic for worker’s wage demands to post-1968 occupations challenging corporate and government malignance.

In our first segment Clover gives an overview of his work of political theory and tells us why we’re in a “new age of riot.”

But we’ll begin with a poem from Red Epic to set the tone. This is “Haecceity” a latin word which loosely translates as “thisness” and which Clover expands to mean “a particular sensual immediacy of the given thing.”

GUEST

Joshua Clover is a poet, communist, cultural critic, translator, editor, and professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. He has published three acclaimed volumes of poetry including The Totality for Kids and his most recent, Red Epic, published by Commune Editions in 2015, and a book of political theory, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings published by Verso.

RELATED

"Revolutionary Letters No. 19" Diane di Prima

DHI Conversation: The Geopolitics of COVID-19 with Mike Davis and Joshua Clover

The Year in Struggles by Joshua Clover

MUSIC

"Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" Handsome Furs

"Run This Town" Jay-Z (with Rhianna and Kanye West)

"White Riot" The Clash

"Paper Airplanes" MIA

Songs under Clover's poems:

"Thisness" Miles Davis

"Transistor" Kraftwerk

"Duck-Rabbit" Alog

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assisted by Bella Bravo

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Our conversation (recorded on 4/17) highlights the way we think about medical, social and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. An event like this reveals a “complex system” of interactions at the intersection of economics, social systems, and the disease itself.

The goal is to try to attain some lucidity in the face of innumerable speculations about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, by defining many of the terms that are being used to discuss it. These are complex issues and there needs to be a more basic understanding of primary concerns.

To do that we’ll focus on things like the R0 value or the basic reproduction number, contact tracing, super-spreaders, herd immunity, the length of time we might expect the pandemic to continue, and the likelihood of a resurgence (not once but twice).

We’ll also take a look at the technological solutions on offer that might be utilized to enable a return to a closer-to-normal version of economic activity. These digital surveillance applications, though, raise real privacy concerns for many. However, and this may be a surprise to you, you are not legally well-protected when it comes to privacy protections in the first place.

Finally, what is stressed is the way that all of these considerations must take place within a global and networked world order. A pandemic doesn’t just affect those who are ill – for example the consequences reach into food systems and supply chains, far more fragile than we might suspect.

GUEST

Samuel Scarpino is an Assistant Professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Scarpino’s research spans a broad range of topics in complex systems and network science, including: infectious disease dynamics, forecasting and predictive modeling, complex network analysis, disease genomics and transcriptomics, outbreak surveillance, social networks, gene network evolution, and decision making under uncertainty. He also directs the Emergent Epidemics Lab which investigates questions using mathematical and computational methods from biology, statistics, physics, applied mathematics, and computer science.

RELATED

Emergent Epidemics Lab

Santa Fe Institute

Herd Immunity Won’t Come Anytime Soon for COVID-19

The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears (The Atlantic)

MUSIC – Kris Davis, pianist and composer

“The Slightest Shift” (The Slightest Shift)

“Stone’s Throw” (Diatom Ribbons)

“Twice Escaped” (The Slightest Shift)

“Evidence” (Massive Threads)

“I Needed It Yesterday” (Too Many Continents – Nick Fraser)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin

Audio Editor: Sean Milligan

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Our conversation (recorded on 4/17) highlights the way we think about medical, social and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. An event like this reveals a “complex system” of interactions at the intersection of economics, social systems, and the disease itself.

The goal is to try to attain some lucidity in the face of innumerable speculations about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, by defining many of the terms that are being used to discuss it. These are complex issues and there needs to be a more basic understanding of primary concerns.

To do that we’ll focus on things like the R0 value or the basic reproduction number, contact tracing, super-spreaders, herd immunity, the length of time we might expect the pandemic to continue, and the likelihood of a resurgence (not once but twice).

We’ll also take a look at the technological solutions on offer that might be utilized to enable a return to a closer-to-normal version of economic activity. These digital surveillance applications, though, raise real privacy concerns for many. However, and this may be a surprise to you, you are not legally well-protected when it comes to privacy protections in the first place.

Finally, what is stressed is the way that all of these considerations must take place within a global and networked world order. A pandemic doesn’t just affect those who are ill - for example the consequences reach into food systems and supply chains, far more fragile than we might suspect.

GUEST

Samuel Scarpino is an Assistant Professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Scarpino’s research spans a broad range of topics in complex systems and network science, including: infectious disease dynamics, forecasting and predictive modeling, complex network analysis, disease genomics and transcriptomics, outbreak surveillance, social networks, gene network evolution, and decision making under uncertainty. He also directs the Emergent Epidemics Lab which investigates questions using mathematical and computational methods from biology, statistics, physics, applied mathematics, and computer science.

RELATED

Emergent Epidemics Lab

Santa Fe Institute

Herd Immunity Won't Come Anytime Soon for COVID-19

The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears (The Atlantic)

MUSIC - Kris Davis, pianist and composer

"The Slightest Shift" (The Slightest Shift)

"Stone’s Throw" (Diatom Ribbons)

"Twice Escaped" (The Slightest Shift)

"Evidence" (Massive Threads)

"I Needed It Yesterday" (Too Many Continents - Nick Fraser)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin

Audio Editor: Sean Milligan

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Just as so many of us know the story of Frankenstein’s Monster without having read the novel that birthed him, so too we know the story of Lionel Verney, the last man on earth. The fear of being left totally alone and the sorrow of loss are powerfully depicted in Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man.

The Last Man is a futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel is said to offer a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and to demonstrate the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters. But that’s not how today’s guest reads this important book.

Shelley’s The Last Man might be read as a kind of version of the 12th century Persian epic “The Conference of the Birds.” In this poem, the birds are figures that represent human faults which prevent humanity from attaining enlightenment. Trapped in singular perspectives, and individual versions of truth, the birds cannot evolve. And so a perilous journey to seek wisdom must be undertaken. In the poem there are seven valleys that must be crossed along the way in order to cast aside dogma and learn the inadequacies of worldly knowledge and desires, and in confronting, with sublime awe, the depths of human ignorance realize a kind of self annihilation.

This is the journey undertaken by Lionel Verney, the narrator of the novel and the titular “last man.”

And Verney is Mary Shelley, who, after the successive losses of three children and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley who drowned in a sailing accident, must surely have felt as alone and lost as any last human. She was deeply depressed. Percy had written of this period in his notebook:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—

But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road

That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

Do thou return for mine.

When Mary’s father, anarchist philosopher and novelist William Godwin, learned of the news of the death of her daughter, Clara, he “called her to stoicism,” writing in a letter that “it is only persons of a very ordinary sort…that sink long under a calamity of this nature.” And then when her son William died in June the very next year, Godwin urged her to accept her fate and return to work, insisting “she was formed ‘by nature’ to belong to those who can ‘advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility.”*

We can class The Last Man as one of those works.

*William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary by Peter Marshall

GUEST

Eileen Hunt Botting, a political theorist and professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame whose work focuses on political thought from the 17th century to the present. She’s the author of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, and of the forthcoming Artificial Life After Frankenstein, both from Penn Press.

RELATED

In the Name of the Future: Life After the Human Catastrophe

Our Father Frankenstein

Opinion | Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic by Eileen Hunt Botting

MUSIC

Conference of the Birds, Dave Holland Quartet (1972)

“Conference of the Birds”

“Four Winds”

“Interception”

“See-saw”

“Now Here (Nowhere)”

CREDITS

Just as so many of us know the story of Frankenstein’s Monster without having read the novel that birthed him, so too we know the story of Lionel Verney, the last man on earth. The fear of being left totally alone and the sorrow of loss are powerfully depicted in Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man.

The Last Man is a futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel is said to offer a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and to demonstrate the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters. But that’s not how today’s guest reads this important book.

Shelley’s The Last Man might be read as a kind of version of the 12th century Persian epic “The Conference of the Birds.” In this poem, the birds are figures that represent human faults which prevent humanity from attaining enlightenment. Trapped in singular perspectives, and individual versions of truth, the birds cannot evolve. And so a perilous journey to seek wisdom must be undertaken. In the poem there are seven valleys that must be crossed along the way in order to cast aside dogma and learn the inadequacies of worldly knowledge and desires, and in confronting, with sublime awe, the depths of human ignorance realize a kind of self annihilation.

This is the journey undertaken by Lionel Verney, the narrator of the novel and the titular “last man.”

And Verney is Mary Shelley, who, after the successive losses of three children and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley who drowned in a sailing accident, must surely have felt as alone and lost as any last human. She was deeply depressed. Percy had written of this period in his notebook:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—

But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road

That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

Do thou return for mine.

When Mary’s father, anarchist philosopher and novelist William Godwin, learned of the news of the death of her daughter, Clara, he “called her to stoicism,” writing in a letter that “it is only persons of a very ordinary sort...that sink long under a calamity of this nature.” And then when her son William died in June the very next year, Godwin urged her to accept her fate and return to work, insisting “she was formed ‘by nature’ to belong to those who can ‘advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility.”*

We can class The Last Man as one of those works.

*William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary by Peter Marshall

Eileen Hunt Botting (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame)

GUEST

Eileen Hunt Botting, a political theorist and professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame whose work focuses on political thought from the 17th century to the present. She’s the author of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, and of the forthcoming Artificial Life After Frankenstein, both from Penn Press.

RELATED

In the Name of the Future: Life After the Human Catastrophe

Our Father Frankenstein

Opinion | Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic by Eileen Hunt Botting

MUSIC

Conference of the Birds, Dave Holland Quartet (1972)