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Ian Watt Lecture: Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines" - (2/20/24)
Ian Watt Lecture: Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines" - 2/20/24, or read the full transcript below.
Ian Watt Lecture: Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines"
[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: [00:00:00] Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University, Alex Woloch, the Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities in the English Department at Stanford, and Sasha Starovoitov a PhD student in the Stanford English Department. Caroline visited the Center on February 20th, 2024 to deliver her Ian Watt lecture, "Studying the Novel in the Climate Crisis, or a Tale of Three Pipelines." This conversation was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: Hi, and welcome to our Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. We're delighted today to welcome
[00:01:00]
Caroline Levine, who is going to give the Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel. So let me get started by asking you all just to say a few words about yourself.
And the question I thought of asking was, where are you coming from?
Caroline Levine: Well, I, so this is Caroline Levine. I came from Ithaca. I teach at Cornell University, and I was experimenting with low carbon travel to get here. So it took me many days, and I can really recommend the train, had a little sleeping car, but then I drove an EV down the coast from Portland, Oregon, and that was more complicated. So I am coming from Ithaca with a relatively low carbon footprint on the way.
Margaret Cohen: Thank you. Yeah. Do you have any kind of a metric or calculator to measure that?
Caroline Levine: No. I mean, in some sense, the reason I did this was not actually to reduce my own carbon footprint, although that's what it looks like, but to
[00:02:00]
experiment with what the available alternatives are because I don't think any individual, one of us, taking a train rather than a plane is going to make all the difference, but I do think figuring out whether taking the train is a good possibility makes a difference, right? And so, thinking about infrastructure and what's available and, you know, even our ideas about the train. So on the Amtrak train, if you have an overnight compartment, they seat you with other people, strangers in the dining car. And so I just got to ask people why they took the train, you know, so I was learning about, like, what is train culture in this country? I think probably very, a very small percentage of Americans have ever been on a train. You know, I was trying to think about that.
Alex Woloch: Have ever been on a train at all or overnight, maybe. I mean, overnight, it would probably be a low number, but.
Caroline Levine: I would just wonder about being on a train at all, you know?
Margaret Cohen: Alex, have you been on a train?
Alex Woloch: I've been on a train. But I can't really think that I've been on an overnight train. So I can't remember being on an over -- well, you were on an overnight train, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah, yeah.
Alex Woloch:
[00:03:00]
Where you slept on the train.
Caroline Levine: I slept on the train, yeah.
Alex Woloch: What about, what about the rest of you guys?
Margaret Cohen: I've done that in Europe.
Alex Woloch: In Europe.
Margaret Cohen: But I haven't done that here.
Sasha Starovoitov: I've done it in China and in Europe, but I have never done an overnight train in the United States, although I'm very interested in it because the population that does engage with it definitely seems to be enthusiasts, rather than kind of using the train as transportation. So I'm interested whether you met people who were, like, what the distribution was of people, what brought people to the train.
Margaret Cohen: Sasha, I'm just going to interrupt so people can identify.
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, yes, sorry. Hi, I'm Sasha, and I am a first year English PhD student here at Stanford and delighted to be joining this conversation.
Margaret Cohen: And what's your favorite train ride?
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, my favorite train ride is the most sentimental one, which is, uh, my family is from Belarus, and there is a train that goes from the capital city out to the countryside, and you see these, it is not a very comfortable train at all, but it is one that holds the most memories for me, so.
[00:04:00]
Margaret Cohen: Wow. And Alex?
Alex Woloch: I don't know that I have a, oh, I'm Alex Woloch. Is that what you wanted?
[laughter in background]
I'm a twenty-- let's see, approximately 24th year English professor at Stanford, and I don't think I can think of a favorite train ride easily, having not, having not been on a train for, for a while, definitely.
It does seem like an interesting thing to talk about, and does seem tied up in the work. I don't know if it's tied up in the work you're presenting tonight, but --
Caroline Levine: Definitely. I mean, I think one of the things that I, I'm constantly running up against is this sense that people feel guilty about their own, I mean, you were even saying that, Alex, about driving in by car and then you feel bad in the presence of an environmentalist. But actually, I just don't think that's the way we're going to solve the climate problem is not by guilting everybody into it. And so part of what I'm trying to figure out is kind of
[00:05:00]
how much sacrifice do you need to make?
And that's all wrong, right? The more sacrifice we need to make to do this, the harder it is to convert over and therefore we have to take our cars or we have to fly. So it was, I think, three times more expensive to take the train.
Margaret Cohen: I mean, you start out the activist humanist with a very moving portrayal of your students in class worrying about, you know, their carbon footprint.
And I wondered if that played into your, into your decision to write this book.
Caroline Levine: It absolutely did. I mean, I was a person who always worried about my own carbon footprint until I read, and maybe you all know this already, but it was, a big kind of shock light bulb moment for me when I read that British Petroleum invented the term carbon footprint to get us all focusing on our own individual consumption as opposed to on what British Petroleum
[00:06:00]
is doing.
And so that was a kind of shift for me where I really wanted my students to think about that. You know, is it, is it more effective to get us all feeling guilty? No, I think, although, uh, people put a lot of pressure on themselves to try to live up to these high environmental standards. But what if we were putting pressure on, you know, the hundred companies that are responsible for the great majority of emissions worldwide, like, that seems actually much easier than changing billions of people's habits when changing those habits is a big sacrifice for people.
So yes, it's all part of the -- trying to think with my students about what would be effective.
Alex Woloch: Can I jump? I mean, can I jump? I don't, can I? Yeah, no, just thinking about like pedagogy in your work, and it seems really tied into it. So I guess the, and also just the, sort of the question of response to the environmental crisis.
The part of what you're modeling is that response is partially, is partially about, like, how
[00:07:00]
we write, how we teach, what we teach, what we write. So that question of, like, how much has your work in the classroom turned to kind of, ecology and environment, and how is that? And then just, and I think this is a big question, like, for any literary scholars, this curiosity about the place of literature in your work.
So, so with teaching, I mean, I feel like we could probably get to the same answers, whether we're talking about the books or your classes.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, no, it's true. And it's, sometimes I feel like I jumped off a cliff, because I really --
Alex Woloch: Just one?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Yeah, maybe many cliffs. That's a good point, but you know, leaving the humanities behind in some really crucial way by saying, you know, just to address the climate crisis, I don't think reading literature in any of the traditional ways that I was trained to and love to do and still wish I could do, isn't actually gonna help us. I think there are ways of
[00:08:00]
thinking humanistically that are still valuable. But a lot of what people will say, a lot of environmental humanists will say is that, you know, literature or the arts give us these new modes of attention.
And that I think is true, but also really slow, right? And we don't have the time with the climate crisis. So to me, part of the structure, the form of thinking about it has to do with the kind of urgency of acting now and so I think, you know, if we could stop the climate crisis, I'd go back to reading literature my old --
Alex Woloch: And teaching.
Caroline Levine: -- favorite ways and teaching that.
But really I teach students, you know, it's a very odd kind of teaching for me trained as a literary critic. We look at Cornell, and we think about what we know about Cornell's contribution to the climate crisis, and then we try to solve it actively. And some of that is communication because a
[00:09:00]
lot of people don't know what Cornell is doing well and what Cornell is doing badly, that a lot of the worst emissions are completely invisible to most people, and so it's a research project and then a communications project and it, but it doesn't feel like the humanities. So --
Alex Woloch: But is that a class or is that, like, most of the teaching you're doing?
Caroline Levine: That's most of the teaching I do.
Alex Woloch: ’Cause that seems like a big difference too. Like, if it's just one class.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: But it sounds more radical than that. Like, the shift.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I mean, I do, so, I teach writing. That's one of the ways I teach this is that Cornell professors in the English department, we all teach first year writing seminars. And so I do that pretty much every year where the first year students do this kind of climate communication and research stuff, so that feels like a little more in keeping with what we do. And they write op-eds and they, and they write, kind of persuasive cases for why we should pay attention to what they want to do. So it's still within the genres that I'm familiar with, but then I teach the same course in the upper level and we
[00:10:00]
watch movies and we read novels, but we're really thinking about like climate storytelling and what does that require and how can we tell stories?
And so it's much more of a practice based kind of lab situation is what it feels like. So yeah, a radical shift, and I don't feel great about that, to be honest, I don't feel great about that. It feels again like a kind of horizon of urgency, rather than what I'm good at, what I'm trained to do, you know, and I, you know, I feel like humanists, we are not supposed to do this kind of stuff, you know? This is exactly what we're not supposed to do. So I don't know. How does it sit with you, Margaret, as a ... ?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I, I think a lot about this because I work on the oceans and I've also worked with ocean scientists. And it's interesting that the scientists
[00:11:00]
feel or the scientists I've been talking to are less involved with activist science. That for scientists, activism is, they say, a corner of the sciences and their job is to generate new knowledge and that new knowledge will eventually be taken up in coming up with solutions, but they are not solution oriented and they're surprised to hear me talk about exactly the kinds of issues you're talking about science communication, storytelling, buried environmental knowledge that you can find in texts, say, you know, pictures of corals from the 19th century, and so I kind of am trying to hold these two sides together, you know, and, I think another piece in this, which I'm sure that you would have, you would all have things to say about is the crisis in the humanities and the need to justify what kind of knowledge, humanistic knowledge gives, and, how to continue to do
[00:12:00]
it, which I don't think is the same case for the ocean sciences, for example.
Caroline Levine: Right, right. No, it's so interesting. I do, I, in, just in the last week, I talked to a couple of scientists who said, I, it's a risk to my work if I start taking political positions, right, then my work loses credibility. But some, we were talking about some of the scientists who've done it and successfully.
Alex Woloch: No, I just that's a different kind of risk than the risk that you're talking about.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: It's more internal to, like, the intellectual process.
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Alex Woloch: I mean, they're both risks.
Caroline Levine: Right. I feel like I'm selling out the humanities. They feel like they're underselling their or somehow discrediting their research by, by not being neutral. It's a different thing.
Alex Woloch: But do you really feel yourself, I mean, because like some of the latest book is a defense of the humanities. So it's interesting that it could both be a sense of, like, anxiety about selling out the humanities at the same time, like, like an effort, like a kind of ardent effort of defense or reinvention of the ... .
Caroline Levine:
[00:13:00]
Yeah. No, I would love to think that that's true. I guess I move in circles where it doesn't feel true. Like where, where my fellow academics say, you know, that's really not our work, right? We do this other thing that's really valuable. I don't know, Sasha, do you feel, as a person starting out on this career, do you feel like you have a strong sense of what the humanities, whether it should incorporate this kind of practical action or not?
Sasha Starovoitov: I think my own personal opinion on this is slightly in flux because I've come into academia at a time when, on one hand, I'm, like, vehemently told to be very aware of the boundaries of the kind of work that I do, and I think, like, specifically thinking about the role of the realist novel or the novel, and then, on the other hand, from a more communications end, you are told that, like, narratives are efficient, they are the best way to communicate information, and so you kind of
[00:14:00]
oscillate almost between disciplines, and part of what I really appreciated about your work was like the advocacy for a multidisciplinary kind of reading of forms, right?
The, I mean, I felt so touched by the reading of like the public square in tandem with literature and with kind of, like, where can we read efficacy. And so to me that spoke to the kind of confusion that I believe many of us may feel as kind of people entering into the humanities amidst a time where everyone is telling us not to be here.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, so in a way, if I'm, if I'm getting you right, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's, we, I certainly experienced this, what I think I'm hearing you say, of a, of a dual purpose that's always been there. One is, is a set of skills in reading and writing, which we do teach and that are portable. And the other is this kind of, sphere that's separate from the pressures
[00:15:00]
of the world and particular outcomes. And, and those are, when we teach writing, that's what we're definitely teaching something that's not only aesthetic, right?
Alex Woloch: So what about grad students, like your work with grad students, and grad classes, grad advising?
Caroline Levine: You know, I have not taught a graduate class in five years.
Alex Woloch: So related to this impulse.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. Yeah, and I am going to teach a course in narrative theory in the fall at the graduate level, but it has that sense of a multiple purpose, exactly like what Sasha is saying. Like, what can we do with narrative? Not only aesthetic, you know, those narratives defined as aesthetic, but what can we do with narrative? And it is an, it's an incredibly compelling public form, right? It, it works.
Sasha Starovoitov: But at the same time you're really met, I feel, maybe on the more kind of aesthetic side with the cynicism about that, like narrative as
[00:16:00]
communication almost feels like a taboo to talk about sometimes. And it's funny to trace that back and that, like, narrative as communication of political action is, you know, not new in any way. And, like, there are so many genres, and, like, smaller genres that jump on this and I know, I know it in like the late 19th century. So that's where I'm coming from. But it's, it's really interesting to kind of, like, think about the sort of taboo that narratives, the, this idea of like narrative as communication of ideology has taken off.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Since you raised genres, a question I've been burning to ask you, in organizing this podcast, and Alex is here too, is realism. Like, what, what do we do with realism? Is it an effective mode of communication? And how does that look? How does it look now? How does it look compared to 19th century realism?
The title of the talk that, that you're going to be giving is "A Tale of Three Pipelines." So, you know, I hear Dickens in the background.
[00:17:00]
So I wonder if I could ask you all to, to think a little bit out loud about that.
Caroline Levine: About realism. Do you have thoughts, Alex?
Alex Woloch: I was going to defer to Caroline because, I mean, let me, I think I'd like to do that and then jump in. But, yeah.
Caroline Levine: Well, you know, part of what I think about realism I've learned from Alex, so I do just want to, like, make a, make a citation here to a person who's sitting in front of me, which is the problem that the novel has of crowds, right? It's just not good at giving us multitudes. And so, ever since reading your book, Alex, I've been thinking about that as one of the limitations of the novel.
And so realism, some realisms try to get beyond the protagonist, but kind of classic Lukács model of the, the protagonist in the middle of a social situation only goes so far, I think, if you want to start thinking about solidarity and collectivity and those kinds of things. So,
[00:18:00]
for me, realism has still some really great potential.
And one of the things that I, you know, I find with the generation that we're teaching right now, they're really into science fiction and fantasy, and I don't have, I, I'm trying to get myself to love science fiction and fantasy and don't, and, and I think part of the reason is I'm really just interested in if we think about a time horizon of like six years for the climate crisis. We've got this little window where we really need to change a lot of things. Let's think about what's feasible. Let's not think about what's beyond, you know, so that great, you know, let's use our imaginations to think the world beyond the present, but let's also think about what we got. What is it? What are our materials right here and now? And that feels like a realist project.
Alex Woloch: I mean, I can jump in. I just wanted to circle back though. And that is, I mean, just to what about what you're saying about grad teaching, because it does, I mean, I
[00:19:00]
think for me, you know, I identify your work, Caroline, and particularly Forms, but it, like, as sort of strikingly galvanizing for graduate students.
It was, I mean, and there's like, I was, you can sort of think about the work that's come out in the last 15 years that like has sort of been organically met with excitement by graduate students and Forms is high up on the list, I'm sure you know this, it was like, there's something about it. I mean, we could talk about that, that seemed particularly like, and I think part of it was like the ground clearing element of it, like the sense of like, there was a kind of fresh air, this kind of different landscape that, that, but, but so on the one hand, like that specificity of your work and other hand, like, the difficulty of knowing what it means like to do graduate teaching now seems really interesting to me.
So then to circle back to realism. Yeah, I mean, this was obviously like that question, like, cause we're here for the novel and the, like, the question of how salient is the novel or not for your current work? Like that seems to be
[00:20:00]
like, there's a push and pull there that you both sort of wanted to speak to the novel or want like the novel is important, but you're also, there's also this wary eye about not just the novel, but any kind of like purely literary distillation, right? So, so I think it's super interesting. And I guess one, one big thought I had, in, like, and I know Forms well, and I was just, I've just been reading the new book, is representation, like the importance of representation. So that's sort of what comes to mind with realism, like realism almost as a proxy for this larger thing, which is representation and how that also seems to be a term that's both super important to your model, but, but also maybe misleading in some ways, at least as it's traditionally understood, like, so, so that would be, so I'd throw that into the mix, I guess.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, it's a little like communication. It's one of those terms that's, we think is flat-footed and
[00:21:00]
ideological only, right? Like it's a, it's a ruse, right? The represent-- you can't represent the world, A, and you can't communicate in some seamless or transparent way, B. So what am I doing? And I think, I guess I think that we, the discipline studies representation, even when we draw attention to its limits, I don't ever think we've given up on it.
So, so it feels to me like, you know, this is again, a sort of like, a non-aesthetic but still formalist claim that every experience we have, every idea we have, is a mediation with forms of some kind, right? And so representation is one mediation. You know, it's not that it's purely transparent, but it is mediating an experience of the world in certain ways and not in others, right?
So to me, it feels fruitful, um, but flat-footed. I mean it does feel,
[00:22:00]
it feels very like, you know, pragmatic and not, you know, not high theory in the, in the way. Although, you know, I, I feel like it's there in theory and that's why I think I'm, I'm always playing this double game of like, yeah, I'm in the, I'm in the conversation, but I'm going off in this direction, which has been mostly devalued, but I still think it's important to go in that direction.
Margaret Cohen: I'm thinking about pragmatism. I mean, it seems to me that like that's a core quality that comes through a lot of writing, which I wouldn't necessarily associate with realism. I'm trying to think through like the steps or why do I not associate pragmatism with realism? You know, there's kind of like the Moretti notion that realism is about compromise.
So that would be a very pragmatic notion of realism, but then there's also a much more tragic sort of Lukácsian notion
[00:23:00]
of realism is about, the inability to kind of come in to come in to find a way through the social world. And I'm not I don't know. I mean, I just wonder if, sort of one, this is not really a question, it's just thinking about how important pragmatism is to you. And if I was to pose it as a question, it would be like, where did that come from?
[laughter in background]
How did you get pragmatic? And why did you go into literary studies as a pragmatic person?
Caroline Levine: That is the real question. What am I doing here? Such great points about realism. I guess the connection I would make between realism and pragmatism is through the critique of both of them, which is like, they both put us back in the world that we are in, as opposed to the world, the dramatically other world that we're supposed to be building, right? That we can't even see because it's beyond our consciousness, right? Which is the sort of radical otherness, you know, it's an
[00:24:00]
Adornian version, I think it's an Adornian version of the aesthetic, which is everywhere now in our field. So that idea that, that you're supposed to not work with the materials that are available to you.
So I, so to me, they, they are connected. And, you know, when you're mentioning the, Moretti, Lukács connection, I'm thinking about, you know, the, the particular forms of the plotted narrative are not the only forms of realism. So you could have realist painting and you could have, you know, realist description and you know, so is it the --
Alex Woloch: Realist film.
Caroline Levine: Realist film for sure.
So is realism, the realism of compromise or the realism of tragedy, that's already a narrative version of realism, but I, I'm wondering if realism could be a lot of other accounts of mediating our experience with the world as it is right now. I
[00:25:00]
do think I had, just to go back to the question of how I ended up in literary studies, I do think it's a little bit of an accident and that I was always the person who thought maybe we should do something practical while everybody else was doing more high minded things, and --
Alex Woloch: What's an example? Like, what's an earlier, you know –
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: What's an earlier version of this? I mean, I, this is not exactly the, the question that you're asking, Alex, but I did, I did become department chair because I thought there are a lot of things we could change, you know, there's a lot of things we could do with the, with the department, that could make it better. And that, you know, people talk about the administration as going to the other side and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, all these things we think about here, you know, citizenship and collectivity, and we could bring all those things into administration. So I think, and that always felt like not a standard literary critical view.
[00:26:00]
But I think I must have that temperamentally. So I think it comes from some deeper childhood –
[laughter in background]
Margaret Cohen: Answer off the air.
Caroline Levine: I don't know what trauma brooders did, but, uh,
Alex Woloch: Do we wanna, Sasha did you have thoughts with the real, with realism? I mean, just as, since we're circling,
Sasha Starovoitov: I've been thinking a lot actually about kind of the way that we've been speaking about individuals and their role in narrative, even outside of the novel.
We started this podcast by kind of asking you about your car journey. And in that way, we got the model of the individual activist. And I'm kind of, maybe to circle back to the novel, I'm curious about, like, the novel's maybe, I guess, complicated statement, but inability to contain collectives. But then, do you ever consider kind of collectives around the novel in its life?
And kind of, once we step outside of actually kind of, the diegetic world and into the world of like the book
[00:27:00]
circulating, is there room for a more collective kind of interaction there rather than the individual that we get in narrative?
Caroline Levine: I love that question, especially for a 19th-century scholar, because of course you have the image of people reading aloud to one another.
And yeah, I mean, I think the novel as we've inherited, it does, is often a solitary form, right? Often read in silence and in privacy, but it doesn't have to be. And maybe what we were saying earlier about a sort of, podcast culture, which is more, it's more oral, it's more collective, you know, what, what kind of new forms of collectivity could come through not reading, but sharing, sharing the voice, in the novel. But I think there are forms that are better, more conducive to groups and crowds. So I think the novel can do that, but you have to sit
[00:28:00]
for a long time in the same space, you know, to listen to a full novel if you want to be a collective listening, or you have to have a serial form for it.
And you know, something like the publicly read poem is actually, you know, thinking about Amanda Gorman, like, that's actually an easier way to have a collective experience, partly because of its brevity.
Margaret Cohen: I also really like your reading of The Wire. I mean, and serial TV does seem to be a great collective, you know, bonding experience in the U. S. And particularly during COVID, I think that that everybody just was able remotely to connect through, through some of these, some of these shows. So, I don't know, it seems to me that the collective is, is alive in that way, but it's an entertainment collective. And this is an old Frankfurt School question, you know, how do you go from the entertainment collective to, to a collective that is going to do anything?
I don't --
Caroline Levine: yeah, I mean, I,
[00:29:00]
my own response these days, I used to feel very, you know, committed to Frankfurt school style analysis, and I think I'm much more Birmingham school now. And so, like, what do publics do with cultural materials? You know, they do all kinds of things. They don't necessarily do what they're supposed to, right?
So what are they up to? You know, over the water cooler used to be the model, I guess we maybe don't have quite the same model anymore, especially with binging, right? We can't have the, like, what's going to happen in the next episode quite the same way. But, but what do publics do? That feels to me like a, there's more richness in that answer, I think, than the Frankfurt School imagines.
And I guess I don't have good examples off the top of my head, but, I have been watching a lot of movies about activism, and there are a lot of them. And they usually focus on individuals. So I find that kind of interesting. And it seems like they give people less to do than they could.
[00:30:00]
So what would an activist genre, which has the same exciting plot of, like, you know, there's a toxin in the water, Erin Brockovich, you know, single mom discovers that there's this corporate malfeasance, right?
But she heroically sees that through to its conclusion. And so you think, well, I'm not in the position to just find, you know, those documents, but what would it be to tell a story like that, which also included kind of lots of other people joining her in the fight, you know, what would that look like? So I think we could make entertainment that had more of the materials for people to act together.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, I'm thinking about collective narratives and it's often, I'm trying to think of examples in my own head and the ones that I'm remembering are all acts of retrospection. So like Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl or Secondhand Time where you're actually, you're getting a kind of like multivocal remembrance, but they're all
[00:31:00]
past looking rather than to, you know, use the six years of the future that we have in front of us and thinking about that. Those are kind of restricted to history in a way.
Margaret Cohen: What about journalism? I know you've had some experience with journalism, Sasha.
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, and that's, you know, Svetlana Alexievich kind of goes, to go back to that most immediate example.
She's kind of in this, yeah, she's a journalist really. But I found in my work in journalism that the, the time span was so immediate that it was almost frustrating to be so constrained to a kind of like, really hyper precise moment and then not be able to go beyond it. I found the form very, almost constricting, and I'm not sure how able it is to capture a collective experience.
Caroline Levine: Mm-Hmm.
[00:32:00]
What kind of journalism were you working in?
Sasha Starovoitov: Specifically climate journalism, yeah. With the Columbia Climate School.
Caroline Levine: Excellent. Yeah.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah. But again, the, the, also, the problem with climate journalism is that as a journalist, you're straddling many, many different, as typical of journalism, kind of asking everyone questions.
So you're asking the scientists, I worked on one specific piece about climate grief where I was, like, talking to psychologists and scientists and everyone, but you're on such a quick turnaround that you can't really capture the, like, totality of, for example, climate grief and its whole, like, body mind experience for the individuals who go through it. So --
Caroline Levine: It's so interesting because I feel like one of the arguments, traditional arguments made for the aesthetic is that you can get that wholeness by way of the artwork. So is that your sense that you can, like, with a really great, you know, written account, you could get that
[00:33:00]
wholeness of climate grief?
Sasha Starovoitov: Potentially, but then you brush up against the problem of time again and immediacy and I think time becomes the real factor that limits, perhaps the movement between journalism and something more holistic.
Alex Woloch: I have a question just coming from this collective. This was the part in your book, your new book, on Call the Midwife, which was a really interesting example. And obviously, I mean, the canon, you call it a canon at one point, the canon, the sort of assortment of texts is, there's a lot to think about with that.
I mean, again, both as it's so generative and also as it's so heterodox, like, it's so much not like a canon that we can grid into. And part of that, it's this magpie approach, right? Like, the idea that we take what we can find and, and, so, I mean, this would seem like an interesting example of, like, in general, there's a kind of looking for the collective in, in art. And one of the thoughts I had with that example was, was
[00:34:00]
just, it's essentially like, is the U. S. different, like, than other places? Like, it's just less hospitable to collectivity and in some sense, and also more problem-- like more of a problem with the climate crisis. And so, there's something about that show in particular that, like, it's impossible without the NHS and the NHS is actually what it's, like, it's actually just insofar as that's a piece of art or narrative that can be collective in, like, a striking way. It's because of the NHS, which doesn't exist, so it wouldn't be possible in the U. S. And I think that raises some, I mean, among other things, it raises an interesting question about the kind of universalism of your model, right? That there's something actually, and I noticed a lot of the examples are British because there's a sense of civil society, like --
Caroline Levine: That's interesting. Yeah.
Alex Woloch: Yeah. You know, obviously with trains, it's the same thing. Like, like, there's just, but in general, like you could say there's a kind of social democratic, like, essentially you're a social democrat.
This is, there's a social democratic politics that's realized in above all in like Europe,
[00:35:00]
right? And you, you have other political examples too, but, but --
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I, I sometimes ask a classroom full of students, so, you know, at Cornell, as at Stanford, students come from all over the world, and I, I kind of asked them about how much they think of themselves, I mean, I don't ask it quite this way, how much they think of themselves in terms of groups or collectives, you know, their communities, their families and how much they think of themselves as individuals and how important those are. And every student from every culture has a mix, and I think that's partly contemporary culture, right?
And, and partly those who come to Cornell have a kind of individualist, there's something that moved them to, to come to this American university and, and study. But, but it's also true that the American students often have a sense of community that they care about a lot. And so, you know, I do think American culture is
[00:36:00]
particularly individualist and has particularly less investment in group, works, in, in public works. But it's not gone, you know, it's still, it's still around. And so again, my future orientation is where can we find it and how could we --
Alex Woloch: And cultivate.
Caroline Levine: Build it, yeah. So, you know, sports teams are one of my examples, right? There's a lot of, uh, first of all, group coordination and second of all group enthusiasm, right?
I mean, of course, it's all tied in with, you know, competition and that kind of thing. But I do think we have these desires for belonging and collectivity and community here too. I wish they were stronger.
Margaret Cohen: Oh God, my Adornian side just wants to say not sports.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: You're not the only one.
Margaret Cohen: So, you, I think you have some of these two sides to you that are utterly fascinating, you know, and one
[00:37:00]
can see that at work in your books. I mean, you kind of, you argue through things, you consider both sides of it, and then you kind of come round in the end to like a pragmatic, but still we have to go on, you know?
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Margaret Cohen: And I, I find, I find that very compelling. And also the airtime, you, you give to the counter arguments and you know, the, whether it's deconstruction or Frankfurt School, there's a sort of modernist, utopian, avant garde gesture that you appreciate and then that you move away from. And, I don't know, what kind of reception do you get from some of those communities?
Caroline Levine: Oh, such a good question. I don't know yet. The book just came out, so we'll find out.
But I do think, right, I think that I was myself so invested in both deconstruction and Frankfurt School thought that the counter arguments are much more powerful in my own head
[00:38:00]
than they might be if I wasn't the generation that I am, you know, that I was trained in that moment. And so that's the voice of what I thought was right. And so that's one reason I think it's both, you know, appealing and a little bit sad to kind of, you know, so it's not that I, I don't want that value still to be around.
It's just that there is this other thing and this other side that I want to push. Yeah, so it's, I think I ended up much more dialectical than I intended to be.
Margaret Cohen: And how do your, I mean, what about for your students?
Caroline Levine: Oh, for my students.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. And I guess I say this as someone who was trained by deconstructionists who themselves had had this incredible training in literary history and rhetoric back in Europe.
And then when they came to the US, they were rebelling against it. So they, they knew it all, but they wouldn't teach it, you know?
Caroline Levine: What a great point. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, yeah, so one of the
[00:39:00]
things I think I don't do in the classroom when I have a group of like environment and sustainability majors that I teach to, you know, every semester, a course that's in that program is, I don't say, this novel that we're reading, this movie that we're watching is an opening to a totally different way of being, so in that sense, I don't teach it, I don't teach what was so exciting for me as a student. But I think it's partly because of them, that they were not buying it for a long time. And I, I think partly it rubbed off on me. So again, Sasha, you're my representative of a different generation, although you're now in a PhD program in English, so you're not fully representative, but, does that image of a kind of art that, because you've, because it gives you a sense of limits, then allows you to imagine something beyond, does that feel like an
[00:40:00]
exciting and motivating force?
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, when you read, okay, so I actually have a question about like, what literature do you read with the students that, kind of, and that's kind of, because I -- that would be my question in response, I guess, first, before I give a more full answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Fair enough.
Sasha Starovoitov: Just a bit, just to kind of understand a little bit better.
Caroline Levine: Well, for a number of years I was teaching Parable of the Sower every semester. And partly, I think, what came to feel kind of significant to me and to the ways in which my students were reading with me was, that the main character in the novel founds a new religion and she does so working with the materials that she's inherited.
So she's not breaking completely from the past, and then she builds a new collective also with the
[00:41:00]
materials that she finds. And so thinking about that novel, you know, I taught it for years in a, in a way that it, it didn't, I think it didn't hit me why I was so drawn to it for a long time. But the students, in my experience, love, love, love the novel and find it incredibly compelling.
The one thing that's strange about it now is that it's, it was written in what, 1990, 19-- early 1990s and set in 2024. And so it's now, the dates are in the now, and that is actually disruptive to students because they don't, they can't quite read it as science fiction anymore. So it seems like it's dated in the moment. So that's one reason I stopped teaching it. And I, let's see, I teach, I'm trying to think of other good examples. I teach quite a lot of poetry. I teach, gosh, all names are, are, are leaving me. There's a poem, really brilliant
[00:42:00]
poem by a woman poet that's more or less from the perspective of the deep-sea drill that BP used that broke during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And it's an almost entirely impersonal poem about this machine, and at the very end it names the dead and then it names the CEOs of the companies, that are responsible. And that also I find teaches incredibly well. And for me, it's the satisfying experience of, you know, not everything is first person experience. Not everything is just how we feel about things. There's also this kind of artwork of the machine that, you know, goes back to my, where my heart really lies right in this kind of formal fascination with how you can write things that aren't necessarily, you know, the immediate experience.
Margaret Cohen: So, so I'm keeping my eye on the time because I know you have a lecture to give that we all want to attend and we have to wrap up soon, but I can't
[00:43:00]
let things go without asking you about a book that ends with a workbook.
Caroline Levine: Oh, yes.
Margaret Cohen: That's, I mean, you talk about avant garde gesture in a really pragmatic way. It's quite dramatic and it was really thought provoking for me about what do I do with my time all day. And so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit about your decision to end the book that way.
Caroline Levine: So I don't know how, okay, here's the, here's my million dollar question. A lot of us care about the climate and a lot of us would like to do something to solve the climate crisis. Most of us don't have a plan for doing that or feel or have a theory of why we can't do that. So my thought about the workbook was how might you get from "I care about the climate crisis, but I don't know what to do about it" to actually doing something about it.
What I think I don't, I'm not sure of, and I'm worried about it, is that that doesn't get people over the
[00:44:00]
hump. Like, they can read all the way through to the end and still not take action, because there's something about that move that's really hard, uh, really, really hard. And it looks like from the research that people get involved in activism when there's a turning point in their lives.
And so one thing we did at Cornell is we, we built a little online course for incoming students about climate, because that's a moment when people might take on a new kind of identity or a new action or a new kind of hobby. So that was, you know, part of this kind of theory of like moments in your life, but I imagined the workbook as something that could be taught in the classroom.
And if it was assigned, that students would actually take the steps and become. activists, but I don't know if scholars will or could. So yeah, very much the pragmatist in me, but trying to solve this problem of that last step because you could persuade people that it's important to do
[00:45:00]
it. You can persuade people that here's some effective things that work and still getting that commitment or that jump over into it, it's like I feel like I become a, you know, a revivalist preacher or something. It's like --
Alex Woloch: But you also call attention to the idea of the turning point.
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Alex Woloch: It's a perfect example of that kind of political formalism, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah. No, right. I think it is a formalist --
Alex Woloch: Where there is no politics without turning points, but like what happens if we pull back and scrutinize that turn that's so --
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. You got it. Yeah. But could, could we push Sasha to answer the earlier question about --
Margaret Cohen: Please.
Caroline Levine: About the, about a sort of Frankfurt School version of the aesthetic? Like, you don't know. You don't have to commit. I'm just curious.
Sasha Starovoitov: I'm not entirely sure how to answer your question and speak for, like, an entire generation of readers, especially because I have, like, a limited interaction with -- my world is grad students.
Caroline Levine: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Sasha Starovoitov: So I've been partially, like, deformed by
[00:46:00]
that.
Caroline Levine: No, I'm really, really just talking about you.
Alex Woloch: What did the people on the Amtrak train say when they asked if we'd seen anything?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Actually, interestingly, these two young guys were talking about how they listen to audiobooks, but they don't read, and they feel guilty about it.
And I was like, I consider that reading, you know, I consider that, you know, they were like, no, no, I'm not a reader, you know, I only listen to audiobooks and they were doing it on the train. So uh, anyway, just to know whether you think that the --
Alex Woloch: Tried to deflect it.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: I know, I know, I, and I feel like I've asked the question wrong and if I asked, if I asked it right, you would have an answer, but it's sort of like, is the pragmatic appealing or is this idea of the aesthetic as a separate realm that you purposefully inhabit as not pragmatic is appealing.
Sasha Starovoitov: Is the pragmatic appealing, it's such a difficult question. And I think in part it also comes from the, so what I, okay, so if I am also to answer for kind of a
[00:47:00]
Generational, like, relationship to the pragmatic and the aesthetic and related to activism. I think when I look at the pragmatic, I come from a generation of individuals who have seen pragmatic solutions consistently fail at the institutional level I'm from a town that's like 30 minutes from Sandy Hook, so like I feel very so, so for me as my, like, if I'm to speak about, like, my own Individual formation as an activist that is where it starts and turning points. But the problem with that was that I grew up in a milieu that consistently approached pragmatic solutions towards gun control and then watched them fail at a national level over and over and over again.
And there is a desire, I think, for the aesthetic to remain somehow separate because if the pragmatic solution fails at the level of, like,
[00:48:00]
death and actual tragedy, what can the pragmatic in the aesthetic really do? What can the pragmatic in the aesthetic form really accomplish when something that is so horrifying in reality cannot accomplish?
And so seeing the failure of any solution, I think for me personally led me to want to actually reserve the aesthetic as a kind of aesthetic, not for a therapeutic reason. I think, like, the converse is that it's not that I see the aesthetic as therapeutic either in the kind of, like, escapist model, which I think is equally as kind of problematic in climate, specifically climate conversations about the role of narrative and the aesthetic.
But I think there's, there's a kind of more existential feeling about both pragmatism and the role of the aesthetics and that like, it feels at the end of the day that many fail in an activist
[00:49:00]
sense. That's a very pessimistic answer, and unfortunately, is, like, my own personal one, based upon where I came from.
Caroline Levine: It's very moving, and I think it's important, so I'm glad I pushed you to answer.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, no, of course.
Caroline Levine: I realize it was a lot of prodding, but thank you for that. That is very moving.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, thank you. And thank you all. It's just been really a thought provoking conversation, which I am going to take forward with me in my own conversations with people in environmental humanities, as well as, you know, my own conversations with myself, really looking forward to your talk in just about an hour.
Caroline Levine: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure.
Alex Woloch: Cool. Should we cut
[00:50:00]
tape?
[laughter, and outro music plays]
[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: [00:00:00] Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University, Alex Woloch, the Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities in the English Department at Stanford, and Sasha Starovoitov a PhD student in the Stanford English Department. Caroline visited the Center on February 20th, 2024 to deliver her Ian Watt lecture, "Studying the Novel in the Climate Crisis, or a Tale of Three Pipelines." This conversation was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: Hi, and welcome to our Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. We're delighted today to welcome
[00:01:00]
Caroline Levine, who is going to give the Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel. So let me get started by asking you all just to say a few words about yourself.
And the question I thought of asking was, where are you coming from?
Caroline Levine: Well, I, so this is Caroline Levine. I came from Ithaca. I teach at Cornell University, and I was experimenting with low carbon travel to get here. So it took me many days, and I can really recommend the train, had a little sleeping car, but then I drove an EV down the coast from Portland, Oregon, and that was more complicated. So I am coming from Ithaca with a relatively low carbon footprint on the way.
Margaret Cohen: Thank you. Yeah. Do you have any kind of a metric or calculator to measure that?
Caroline Levine: No. I mean, in some sense, the reason I did this was not actually to reduce my own carbon footprint, although that's what it looks like, but to
[00:02:00]
experiment with what the available alternatives are because I don't think any individual, one of us, taking a train rather than a plane is going to make all the difference, but I do think figuring out whether taking the train is a good possibility makes a difference, right? And so, thinking about infrastructure and what's available and, you know, even our ideas about the train. So on the Amtrak train, if you have an overnight compartment, they seat you with other people, strangers in the dining car. And so I just got to ask people why they took the train, you know, so I was learning about, like, what is train culture in this country? I think probably very, a very small percentage of Americans have ever been on a train. You know, I was trying to think about that.
Alex Woloch: Have ever been on a train at all or overnight, maybe. I mean, overnight, it would probably be a low number, but.
Caroline Levine: I would just wonder about being on a train at all, you know?
Margaret Cohen: Alex, have you been on a train?
Alex Woloch: I've been on a train. But I can't really think that I've been on an overnight train. So I can't remember being on an over -- well, you were on an overnight train, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah, yeah.
Alex Woloch:
[00:03:00]
Where you slept on the train.
Caroline Levine: I slept on the train, yeah.
Alex Woloch: What about, what about the rest of you guys?
Margaret Cohen: I've done that in Europe.
Alex Woloch: In Europe.
Margaret Cohen: But I haven't done that here.
Sasha Starovoitov: I've done it in China and in Europe, but I have never done an overnight train in the United States, although I'm very interested in it because the population that does engage with it definitely seems to be enthusiasts, rather than kind of using the train as transportation. So I'm interested whether you met people who were, like, what the distribution was of people, what brought people to the train.
Margaret Cohen: Sasha, I'm just going to interrupt so people can identify.
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, yes, sorry. Hi, I'm Sasha, and I am a first year English PhD student here at Stanford and delighted to be joining this conversation.
Margaret Cohen: And what's your favorite train ride?
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, my favorite train ride is the most sentimental one, which is, uh, my family is from Belarus, and there is a train that goes from the capital city out to the countryside, and you see these, it is not a very comfortable train at all, but it is one that holds the most memories for me, so.
[00:04:00]
Margaret Cohen: Wow. And Alex?
Alex Woloch: I don't know that I have a, oh, I'm Alex Woloch. Is that what you wanted?
[laughter in background]
I'm a twenty-- let's see, approximately 24th year English professor at Stanford, and I don't think I can think of a favorite train ride easily, having not, having not been on a train for, for a while, definitely.
It does seem like an interesting thing to talk about, and does seem tied up in the work. I don't know if it's tied up in the work you're presenting tonight, but --
Caroline Levine: Definitely. I mean, I think one of the things that I, I'm constantly running up against is this sense that people feel guilty about their own, I mean, you were even saying that, Alex, about driving in by car and then you feel bad in the presence of an environmentalist. But actually, I just don't think that's the way we're going to solve the climate problem is not by guilting everybody into it. And so part of what I'm trying to figure out is kind of
[00:05:00]
how much sacrifice do you need to make?
And that's all wrong, right? The more sacrifice we need to make to do this, the harder it is to convert over and therefore we have to take our cars or we have to fly. So it was, I think, three times more expensive to take the train.
Margaret Cohen: I mean, you start out the activist humanist with a very moving portrayal of your students in class worrying about, you know, their carbon footprint.
And I wondered if that played into your, into your decision to write this book.
Caroline Levine: It absolutely did. I mean, I was a person who always worried about my own carbon footprint until I read, and maybe you all know this already, but it was, a big kind of shock light bulb moment for me when I read that British Petroleum invented the term carbon footprint to get us all focusing on our own individual consumption as opposed to on what British Petroleum
[00:06:00]
is doing.
And so that was a kind of shift for me where I really wanted my students to think about that. You know, is it, is it more effective to get us all feeling guilty? No, I think, although, uh, people put a lot of pressure on themselves to try to live up to these high environmental standards. But what if we were putting pressure on, you know, the hundred companies that are responsible for the great majority of emissions worldwide, like, that seems actually much easier than changing billions of people's habits when changing those habits is a big sacrifice for people.
So yes, it's all part of the -- trying to think with my students about what would be effective.
Alex Woloch: Can I jump? I mean, can I jump? I don't, can I? Yeah, no, just thinking about like pedagogy in your work, and it seems really tied into it. So I guess the, and also just the, sort of the question of response to the environmental crisis.
The part of what you're modeling is that response is partially, is partially about, like, how
[00:07:00]
we write, how we teach, what we teach, what we write. So that question of, like, how much has your work in the classroom turned to kind of, ecology and environment, and how is that? And then just, and I think this is a big question, like, for any literary scholars, this curiosity about the place of literature in your work.
So, so with teaching, I mean, I feel like we could probably get to the same answers, whether we're talking about the books or your classes.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, no, it's true. And it's, sometimes I feel like I jumped off a cliff, because I really --
Alex Woloch: Just one?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Yeah, maybe many cliffs. That's a good point, but you know, leaving the humanities behind in some really crucial way by saying, you know, just to address the climate crisis, I don't think reading literature in any of the traditional ways that I was trained to and love to do and still wish I could do, isn't actually gonna help us. I think there are ways of
[00:08:00]
thinking humanistically that are still valuable. But a lot of what people will say, a lot of environmental humanists will say is that, you know, literature or the arts give us these new modes of attention.
And that I think is true, but also really slow, right? And we don't have the time with the climate crisis. So to me, part of the structure, the form of thinking about it has to do with the kind of urgency of acting now and so I think, you know, if we could stop the climate crisis, I'd go back to reading literature my old --
Alex Woloch: And teaching.
Caroline Levine: -- favorite ways and teaching that.
But really I teach students, you know, it's a very odd kind of teaching for me trained as a literary critic. We look at Cornell, and we think about what we know about Cornell's contribution to the climate crisis, and then we try to solve it actively. And some of that is communication because a
[00:09:00]
lot of people don't know what Cornell is doing well and what Cornell is doing badly, that a lot of the worst emissions are completely invisible to most people, and so it's a research project and then a communications project and it, but it doesn't feel like the humanities. So --
Alex Woloch: But is that a class or is that, like, most of the teaching you're doing?
Caroline Levine: That's most of the teaching I do.
Alex Woloch: ’Cause that seems like a big difference too. Like, if it's just one class.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: But it sounds more radical than that. Like, the shift.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I mean, I do, so, I teach writing. That's one of the ways I teach this is that Cornell professors in the English department, we all teach first year writing seminars. And so I do that pretty much every year where the first year students do this kind of climate communication and research stuff, so that feels like a little more in keeping with what we do. And they write op-eds and they, and they write, kind of persuasive cases for why we should pay attention to what they want to do. So it's still within the genres that I'm familiar with, but then I teach the same course in the upper level and we
[00:10:00]
watch movies and we read novels, but we're really thinking about like climate storytelling and what does that require and how can we tell stories?
And so it's much more of a practice based kind of lab situation is what it feels like. So yeah, a radical shift, and I don't feel great about that, to be honest, I don't feel great about that. It feels again like a kind of horizon of urgency, rather than what I'm good at, what I'm trained to do, you know, and I, you know, I feel like humanists, we are not supposed to do this kind of stuff, you know? This is exactly what we're not supposed to do. So I don't know. How does it sit with you, Margaret, as a ... ?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I, I think a lot about this because I work on the oceans and I've also worked with ocean scientists. And it's interesting that the scientists
[00:11:00]
feel or the scientists I've been talking to are less involved with activist science. That for scientists, activism is, they say, a corner of the sciences and their job is to generate new knowledge and that new knowledge will eventually be taken up in coming up with solutions, but they are not solution oriented and they're surprised to hear me talk about exactly the kinds of issues you're talking about science communication, storytelling, buried environmental knowledge that you can find in texts, say, you know, pictures of corals from the 19th century, and so I kind of am trying to hold these two sides together, you know, and, I think another piece in this, which I'm sure that you would have, you would all have things to say about is the crisis in the humanities and the need to justify what kind of knowledge, humanistic knowledge gives, and, how to continue to do
[00:12:00]
it, which I don't think is the same case for the ocean sciences, for example.
Caroline Levine: Right, right. No, it's so interesting. I do, I, in, just in the last week, I talked to a couple of scientists who said, I, it's a risk to my work if I start taking political positions, right, then my work loses credibility. But some, we were talking about some of the scientists who've done it and successfully.
Alex Woloch: No, I just that's a different kind of risk than the risk that you're talking about.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: It's more internal to, like, the intellectual process.
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Alex Woloch: I mean, they're both risks.
Caroline Levine: Right. I feel like I'm selling out the humanities. They feel like they're underselling their or somehow discrediting their research by, by not being neutral. It's a different thing.
Alex Woloch: But do you really feel yourself, I mean, because like some of the latest book is a defense of the humanities. So it's interesting that it could both be a sense of, like, anxiety about selling out the humanities at the same time, like, like an effort, like a kind of ardent effort of defense or reinvention of the ... .
Caroline Levine:
[00:13:00]
Yeah. No, I would love to think that that's true. I guess I move in circles where it doesn't feel true. Like where, where my fellow academics say, you know, that's really not our work, right? We do this other thing that's really valuable. I don't know, Sasha, do you feel, as a person starting out on this career, do you feel like you have a strong sense of what the humanities, whether it should incorporate this kind of practical action or not?
Sasha Starovoitov: I think my own personal opinion on this is slightly in flux because I've come into academia at a time when, on one hand, I'm, like, vehemently told to be very aware of the boundaries of the kind of work that I do, and I think, like, specifically thinking about the role of the realist novel or the novel, and then, on the other hand, from a more communications end, you are told that, like, narratives are efficient, they are the best way to communicate information, and so you kind of
[00:14:00]
oscillate almost between disciplines, and part of what I really appreciated about your work was like the advocacy for a multidisciplinary kind of reading of forms, right?
The, I mean, I felt so touched by the reading of like the public square in tandem with literature and with kind of, like, where can we read efficacy. And so to me that spoke to the kind of confusion that I believe many of us may feel as kind of people entering into the humanities amidst a time where everyone is telling us not to be here.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, so in a way, if I'm, if I'm getting you right, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's, we, I certainly experienced this, what I think I'm hearing you say, of a, of a dual purpose that's always been there. One is, is a set of skills in reading and writing, which we do teach and that are portable. And the other is this kind of, sphere that's separate from the pressures
[00:15:00]
of the world and particular outcomes. And, and those are, when we teach writing, that's what we're definitely teaching something that's not only aesthetic, right?
Alex Woloch: So what about grad students, like your work with grad students, and grad classes, grad advising?
Caroline Levine: You know, I have not taught a graduate class in five years.
Alex Woloch: So related to this impulse.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. Yeah, and I am going to teach a course in narrative theory in the fall at the graduate level, but it has that sense of a multiple purpose, exactly like what Sasha is saying. Like, what can we do with narrative? Not only aesthetic, you know, those narratives defined as aesthetic, but what can we do with narrative? And it is an, it's an incredibly compelling public form, right? It, it works.
Sasha Starovoitov: But at the same time you're really met, I feel, maybe on the more kind of aesthetic side with the cynicism about that, like narrative as
[00:16:00]
communication almost feels like a taboo to talk about sometimes. And it's funny to trace that back and that, like, narrative as communication of political action is, you know, not new in any way. And, like, there are so many genres, and, like, smaller genres that jump on this and I know, I know it in like the late 19th century. So that's where I'm coming from. But it's, it's really interesting to kind of, like, think about the sort of taboo that narratives, the, this idea of like narrative as communication of ideology has taken off.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Since you raised genres, a question I've been burning to ask you, in organizing this podcast, and Alex is here too, is realism. Like, what, what do we do with realism? Is it an effective mode of communication? And how does that look? How does it look now? How does it look compared to 19th century realism?
The title of the talk that, that you're going to be giving is "A Tale of Three Pipelines." So, you know, I hear Dickens in the background.
[00:17:00]
So I wonder if I could ask you all to, to think a little bit out loud about that.
Caroline Levine: About realism. Do you have thoughts, Alex?
Alex Woloch: I was going to defer to Caroline because, I mean, let me, I think I'd like to do that and then jump in. But, yeah.
Caroline Levine: Well, you know, part of what I think about realism I've learned from Alex, so I do just want to, like, make a, make a citation here to a person who's sitting in front of me, which is the problem that the novel has of crowds, right? It's just not good at giving us multitudes. And so, ever since reading your book, Alex, I've been thinking about that as one of the limitations of the novel.
And so realism, some realisms try to get beyond the protagonist, but kind of classic Lukács model of the, the protagonist in the middle of a social situation only goes so far, I think, if you want to start thinking about solidarity and collectivity and those kinds of things. So,
[00:18:00]
for me, realism has still some really great potential.
And one of the things that I, you know, I find with the generation that we're teaching right now, they're really into science fiction and fantasy, and I don't have, I, I'm trying to get myself to love science fiction and fantasy and don't, and, and I think part of the reason is I'm really just interested in if we think about a time horizon of like six years for the climate crisis. We've got this little window where we really need to change a lot of things. Let's think about what's feasible. Let's not think about what's beyond, you know, so that great, you know, let's use our imaginations to think the world beyond the present, but let's also think about what we got. What is it? What are our materials right here and now? And that feels like a realist project.
Alex Woloch: I mean, I can jump in. I just wanted to circle back though. And that is, I mean, just to what about what you're saying about grad teaching, because it does, I mean, I
[00:19:00]
think for me, you know, I identify your work, Caroline, and particularly Forms, but it, like, as sort of strikingly galvanizing for graduate students.
It was, I mean, and there's like, I was, you can sort of think about the work that's come out in the last 15 years that like has sort of been organically met with excitement by graduate students and Forms is high up on the list, I'm sure you know this, it was like, there's something about it. I mean, we could talk about that, that seemed particularly like, and I think part of it was like the ground clearing element of it, like the sense of like, there was a kind of fresh air, this kind of different landscape that, that, but, but so on the one hand, like that specificity of your work and other hand, like, the difficulty of knowing what it means like to do graduate teaching now seems really interesting to me.
So then to circle back to realism. Yeah, I mean, this was obviously like that question, like, cause we're here for the novel and the, like, the question of how salient is the novel or not for your current work? Like that seems to be
[00:20:00]
like, there's a push and pull there that you both sort of wanted to speak to the novel or want like the novel is important, but you're also, there's also this wary eye about not just the novel, but any kind of like purely literary distillation, right? So, so I think it's super interesting. And I guess one, one big thought I had, in, like, and I know Forms well, and I was just, I've just been reading the new book, is representation, like the importance of representation. So that's sort of what comes to mind with realism, like realism almost as a proxy for this larger thing, which is representation and how that also seems to be a term that's both super important to your model, but, but also maybe misleading in some ways, at least as it's traditionally understood, like, so, so that would be, so I'd throw that into the mix, I guess.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, it's a little like communication. It's one of those terms that's, we think is flat-footed and
[00:21:00]
ideological only, right? Like it's a, it's a ruse, right? The represent-- you can't represent the world, A, and you can't communicate in some seamless or transparent way, B. So what am I doing? And I think, I guess I think that we, the discipline studies representation, even when we draw attention to its limits, I don't ever think we've given up on it.
So, so it feels to me like, you know, this is again, a sort of like, a non-aesthetic but still formalist claim that every experience we have, every idea we have, is a mediation with forms of some kind, right? And so representation is one mediation. You know, it's not that it's purely transparent, but it is mediating an experience of the world in certain ways and not in others, right?
So to me, it feels fruitful, um, but flat-footed. I mean it does feel,
[00:22:00]
it feels very like, you know, pragmatic and not, you know, not high theory in the, in the way. Although, you know, I, I feel like it's there in theory and that's why I think I'm, I'm always playing this double game of like, yeah, I'm in the, I'm in the conversation, but I'm going off in this direction, which has been mostly devalued, but I still think it's important to go in that direction.
Margaret Cohen: I'm thinking about pragmatism. I mean, it seems to me that like that's a core quality that comes through a lot of writing, which I wouldn't necessarily associate with realism. I'm trying to think through like the steps or why do I not associate pragmatism with realism? You know, there's kind of like the Moretti notion that realism is about compromise.
So that would be a very pragmatic notion of realism, but then there's also a much more tragic sort of Lukácsian notion
[00:23:00]
of realism is about, the inability to kind of come in to come in to find a way through the social world. And I'm not I don't know. I mean, I just wonder if, sort of one, this is not really a question, it's just thinking about how important pragmatism is to you. And if I was to pose it as a question, it would be like, where did that come from?
[laughter in background]
How did you get pragmatic? And why did you go into literary studies as a pragmatic person?
Caroline Levine: That is the real question. What am I doing here? Such great points about realism. I guess the connection I would make between realism and pragmatism is through the critique of both of them, which is like, they both put us back in the world that we are in, as opposed to the world, the dramatically other world that we're supposed to be building, right? That we can't even see because it's beyond our consciousness, right? Which is the sort of radical otherness, you know, it's an
[00:24:00]
Adornian version, I think it's an Adornian version of the aesthetic, which is everywhere now in our field. So that idea that, that you're supposed to not work with the materials that are available to you.
So I, so to me, they, they are connected. And, you know, when you're mentioning the, Moretti, Lukács connection, I'm thinking about, you know, the, the particular forms of the plotted narrative are not the only forms of realism. So you could have realist painting and you could have, you know, realist description and you know, so is it the --
Alex Woloch: Realist film.
Caroline Levine: Realist film for sure.
So is realism, the realism of compromise or the realism of tragedy, that's already a narrative version of realism, but I, I'm wondering if realism could be a lot of other accounts of mediating our experience with the world as it is right now. I
[00:25:00]
do think I had, just to go back to the question of how I ended up in literary studies, I do think it's a little bit of an accident and that I was always the person who thought maybe we should do something practical while everybody else was doing more high minded things, and --
Alex Woloch: What's an example? Like, what's an earlier, you know –
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: What's an earlier version of this? I mean, I, this is not exactly the, the question that you're asking, Alex, but I did, I did become department chair because I thought there are a lot of things we could change, you know, there's a lot of things we could do with the, with the department, that could make it better. And that, you know, people talk about the administration as going to the other side and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, all these things we think about here, you know, citizenship and collectivity, and we could bring all those things into administration. So I think, and that always felt like not a standard literary critical view.
[00:26:00]
But I think I must have that temperamentally. So I think it comes from some deeper childhood –
[laughter in background]
Margaret Cohen: Answer off the air.
Caroline Levine: I don't know what trauma brooders did, but, uh,
Alex Woloch: Do we wanna, Sasha did you have thoughts with the real, with realism? I mean, just as, since we're circling,
Sasha Starovoitov: I've been thinking a lot actually about kind of the way that we've been speaking about individuals and their role in narrative, even outside of the novel.
We started this podcast by kind of asking you about your car journey. And in that way, we got the model of the individual activist. And I'm kind of, maybe to circle back to the novel, I'm curious about, like, the novel's maybe, I guess, complicated statement, but inability to contain collectives. But then, do you ever consider kind of collectives around the novel in its life?
And kind of, once we step outside of actually kind of, the diegetic world and into the world of like the book
[00:27:00]
circulating, is there room for a more collective kind of interaction there rather than the individual that we get in narrative?
Caroline Levine: I love that question, especially for a 19th-century scholar, because of course you have the image of people reading aloud to one another.
And yeah, I mean, I think the novel as we've inherited, it does, is often a solitary form, right? Often read in silence and in privacy, but it doesn't have to be. And maybe what we were saying earlier about a sort of, podcast culture, which is more, it's more oral, it's more collective, you know, what, what kind of new forms of collectivity could come through not reading, but sharing, sharing the voice, in the novel. But I think there are forms that are better, more conducive to groups and crowds. So I think the novel can do that, but you have to sit
[00:28:00]
for a long time in the same space, you know, to listen to a full novel if you want to be a collective listening, or you have to have a serial form for it.
And you know, something like the publicly read poem is actually, you know, thinking about Amanda Gorman, like, that's actually an easier way to have a collective experience, partly because of its brevity.
Margaret Cohen: I also really like your reading of The Wire. I mean, and serial TV does seem to be a great collective, you know, bonding experience in the U. S. And particularly during COVID, I think that that everybody just was able remotely to connect through, through some of these, some of these shows. So, I don't know, it seems to me that the collective is, is alive in that way, but it's an entertainment collective. And this is an old Frankfurt School question, you know, how do you go from the entertainment collective to, to a collective that is going to do anything?
I don't --
Caroline Levine: yeah, I mean, I,
[00:29:00]
my own response these days, I used to feel very, you know, committed to Frankfurt school style analysis, and I think I'm much more Birmingham school now. And so, like, what do publics do with cultural materials? You know, they do all kinds of things. They don't necessarily do what they're supposed to, right?
So what are they up to? You know, over the water cooler used to be the model, I guess we maybe don't have quite the same model anymore, especially with binging, right? We can't have the, like, what's going to happen in the next episode quite the same way. But, but what do publics do? That feels to me like a, there's more richness in that answer, I think, than the Frankfurt School imagines.
And I guess I don't have good examples off the top of my head, but, I have been watching a lot of movies about activism, and there are a lot of them. And they usually focus on individuals. So I find that kind of interesting. And it seems like they give people less to do than they could.
[00:30:00]
So what would an activist genre, which has the same exciting plot of, like, you know, there's a toxin in the water, Erin Brockovich, you know, single mom discovers that there's this corporate malfeasance, right?
But she heroically sees that through to its conclusion. And so you think, well, I'm not in the position to just find, you know, those documents, but what would it be to tell a story like that, which also included kind of lots of other people joining her in the fight, you know, what would that look like? So I think we could make entertainment that had more of the materials for people to act together.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, I'm thinking about collective narratives and it's often, I'm trying to think of examples in my own head and the ones that I'm remembering are all acts of retrospection. So like Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl or Secondhand Time where you're actually, you're getting a kind of like multivocal remembrance, but they're all
[00:31:00]
past looking rather than to, you know, use the six years of the future that we have in front of us and thinking about that. Those are kind of restricted to history in a way.
Margaret Cohen: What about journalism? I know you've had some experience with journalism, Sasha.
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, and that's, you know, Svetlana Alexievich kind of goes, to go back to that most immediate example.
She's kind of in this, yeah, she's a journalist really. But I found in my work in journalism that the, the time span was so immediate that it was almost frustrating to be so constrained to a kind of like, really hyper precise moment and then not be able to go beyond it. I found the form very, almost constricting, and I'm not sure how able it is to capture a collective experience.
Caroline Levine: Mm-Hmm.
[00:32:00]
What kind of journalism were you working in?
Sasha Starovoitov: Specifically climate journalism, yeah. With the Columbia Climate School.
Caroline Levine: Excellent. Yeah.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah. But again, the, the, also, the problem with climate journalism is that as a journalist, you're straddling many, many different, as typical of journalism, kind of asking everyone questions.
So you're asking the scientists, I worked on one specific piece about climate grief where I was, like, talking to psychologists and scientists and everyone, but you're on such a quick turnaround that you can't really capture the, like, totality of, for example, climate grief and its whole, like, body mind experience for the individuals who go through it. So --
Caroline Levine: It's so interesting because I feel like one of the arguments, traditional arguments made for the aesthetic is that you can get that wholeness by way of the artwork. So is that your sense that you can, like, with a really great, you know, written account, you could get that
[00:33:00]
wholeness of climate grief?
Sasha Starovoitov: Potentially, but then you brush up against the problem of time again and immediacy and I think time becomes the real factor that limits, perhaps the movement between journalism and something more holistic.
Alex Woloch: I have a question just coming from this collective. This was the part in your book, your new book, on Call the Midwife, which was a really interesting example. And obviously, I mean, the canon, you call it a canon at one point, the canon, the sort of assortment of texts is, there's a lot to think about with that.
I mean, again, both as it's so generative and also as it's so heterodox, like, it's so much not like a canon that we can grid into. And part of that, it's this magpie approach, right? Like, the idea that we take what we can find and, and, so, I mean, this would seem like an interesting example of, like, in general, there's a kind of looking for the collective in, in art. And one of the thoughts I had with that example was, was
[00:34:00]
just, it's essentially like, is the U. S. different, like, than other places? Like, it's just less hospitable to collectivity and in some sense, and also more problem-- like more of a problem with the climate crisis. And so, there's something about that show in particular that, like, it's impossible without the NHS and the NHS is actually what it's, like, it's actually just insofar as that's a piece of art or narrative that can be collective in, like, a striking way. It's because of the NHS, which doesn't exist, so it wouldn't be possible in the U. S. And I think that raises some, I mean, among other things, it raises an interesting question about the kind of universalism of your model, right? That there's something actually, and I noticed a lot of the examples are British because there's a sense of civil society, like --
Caroline Levine: That's interesting. Yeah.
Alex Woloch: Yeah. You know, obviously with trains, it's the same thing. Like, like, there's just, but in general, like you could say there's a kind of social democratic, like, essentially you're a social democrat.
This is, there's a social democratic politics that's realized in above all in like Europe,
[00:35:00]
right? And you, you have other political examples too, but, but --
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I, I sometimes ask a classroom full of students, so, you know, at Cornell, as at Stanford, students come from all over the world, and I, I kind of asked them about how much they think of themselves, I mean, I don't ask it quite this way, how much they think of themselves in terms of groups or collectives, you know, their communities, their families and how much they think of themselves as individuals and how important those are. And every student from every culture has a mix, and I think that's partly contemporary culture, right?
And, and partly those who come to Cornell have a kind of individualist, there's something that moved them to, to come to this American university and, and study. But, but it's also true that the American students often have a sense of community that they care about a lot. And so, you know, I do think American culture is
[00:36:00]
particularly individualist and has particularly less investment in group, works, in, in public works. But it's not gone, you know, it's still, it's still around. And so again, my future orientation is where can we find it and how could we --
Alex Woloch: And cultivate.
Caroline Levine: Build it, yeah. So, you know, sports teams are one of my examples, right? There's a lot of, uh, first of all, group coordination and second of all group enthusiasm, right?
I mean, of course, it's all tied in with, you know, competition and that kind of thing. But I do think we have these desires for belonging and collectivity and community here too. I wish they were stronger.
Margaret Cohen: Oh God, my Adornian side just wants to say not sports.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: You're not the only one.
Margaret Cohen: So, you, I think you have some of these two sides to you that are utterly fascinating, you know, and one
[00:37:00]
can see that at work in your books. I mean, you kind of, you argue through things, you consider both sides of it, and then you kind of come round in the end to like a pragmatic, but still we have to go on, you know?
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Margaret Cohen: And I, I find, I find that very compelling. And also the airtime, you, you give to the counter arguments and you know, the, whether it's deconstruction or Frankfurt School, there's a sort of modernist, utopian, avant garde gesture that you appreciate and then that you move away from. And, I don't know, what kind of reception do you get from some of those communities?
Caroline Levine: Oh, such a good question. I don't know yet. The book just came out, so we'll find out.
But I do think, right, I think that I was myself so invested in both deconstruction and Frankfurt School thought that the counter arguments are much more powerful in my own head
[00:38:00]
than they might be if I wasn't the generation that I am, you know, that I was trained in that moment. And so that's the voice of what I thought was right. And so that's one reason I think it's both, you know, appealing and a little bit sad to kind of, you know, so it's not that I, I don't want that value still to be around.
It's just that there is this other thing and this other side that I want to push. Yeah, so it's, I think I ended up much more dialectical than I intended to be.
Margaret Cohen: And how do your, I mean, what about for your students?
Caroline Levine: Oh, for my students.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. And I guess I say this as someone who was trained by deconstructionists who themselves had had this incredible training in literary history and rhetoric back in Europe.
And then when they came to the US, they were rebelling against it. So they, they knew it all, but they wouldn't teach it, you know?
Caroline Levine: What a great point. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, yeah, so one of the
[00:39:00]
things I think I don't do in the classroom when I have a group of like environment and sustainability majors that I teach to, you know, every semester, a course that's in that program is, I don't say, this novel that we're reading, this movie that we're watching is an opening to a totally different way of being, so in that sense, I don't teach it, I don't teach what was so exciting for me as a student. But I think it's partly because of them, that they were not buying it for a long time. And I, I think partly it rubbed off on me. So again, Sasha, you're my representative of a different generation, although you're now in a PhD program in English, so you're not fully representative, but, does that image of a kind of art that, because you've, because it gives you a sense of limits, then allows you to imagine something beyond, does that feel like an
[00:40:00]
exciting and motivating force?
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, when you read, okay, so I actually have a question about like, what literature do you read with the students that, kind of, and that's kind of, because I -- that would be my question in response, I guess, first, before I give a more full answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Fair enough.
Sasha Starovoitov: Just a bit, just to kind of understand a little bit better.
Caroline Levine: Well, for a number of years I was teaching Parable of the Sower every semester. And partly, I think, what came to feel kind of significant to me and to the ways in which my students were reading with me was, that the main character in the novel founds a new religion and she does so working with the materials that she's inherited.
So she's not breaking completely from the past, and then she builds a new collective also with the
[00:41:00]
materials that she finds. And so thinking about that novel, you know, I taught it for years in a, in a way that it, it didn't, I think it didn't hit me why I was so drawn to it for a long time. But the students, in my experience, love, love, love the novel and find it incredibly compelling.
The one thing that's strange about it now is that it's, it was written in what, 1990, 19-- early 1990s and set in 2024. And so it's now, the dates are in the now, and that is actually disruptive to students because they don't, they can't quite read it as science fiction anymore. So it seems like it's dated in the moment. So that's one reason I stopped teaching it. And I, let's see, I teach, I'm trying to think of other good examples. I teach quite a lot of poetry. I teach, gosh, all names are, are, are leaving me. There's a poem, really brilliant
[00:42:00]
poem by a woman poet that's more or less from the perspective of the deep-sea drill that BP used that broke during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And it's an almost entirely impersonal poem about this machine, and at the very end it names the dead and then it names the CEOs of the companies, that are responsible. And that also I find teaches incredibly well. And for me, it's the satisfying experience of, you know, not everything is first person experience. Not everything is just how we feel about things. There's also this kind of artwork of the machine that, you know, goes back to my, where my heart really lies right in this kind of formal fascination with how you can write things that aren't necessarily, you know, the immediate experience.
Margaret Cohen: So, so I'm keeping my eye on the time because I know you have a lecture to give that we all want to attend and we have to wrap up soon, but I can't
[00:43:00]
let things go without asking you about a book that ends with a workbook.
Caroline Levine: Oh, yes.
Margaret Cohen: That's, I mean, you talk about avant garde gesture in a really pragmatic way. It's quite dramatic and it was really thought provoking for me about what do I do with my time all day. And so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit about your decision to end the book that way.
Caroline Levine: So I don't know how, okay, here's the, here's my million dollar question. A lot of us care about the climate and a lot of us would like to do something to solve the climate crisis. Most of us don't have a plan for doing that or feel or have a theory of why we can't do that. So my thought about the workbook was how might you get from "I care about the climate crisis, but I don't know what to do about it" to actually doing something about it.
What I think I don't, I'm not sure of, and I'm worried about it, is that that doesn't get people over the
[00:44:00]
hump. Like, they can read all the way through to the end and still not take action, because there's something about that move that's really hard, uh, really, really hard. And it looks like from the research that people get involved in activism when there's a turning point in their lives.
And so one thing we did at Cornell is we, we built a little online course for incoming students about climate, because that's a moment when people might take on a new kind of identity or a new action or a new kind of hobby. So that was, you know, part of this kind of theory of like moments in your life, but I imagined the workbook as something that could be taught in the classroom.
And if it was assigned, that students would actually take the steps and become. activists, but I don't know if scholars will or could. So yeah, very much the pragmatist in me, but trying to solve this problem of that last step because you could persuade people that it's important to do
[00:45:00]
it. You can persuade people that here's some effective things that work and still getting that commitment or that jump over into it, it's like I feel like I become a, you know, a revivalist preacher or something. It's like --
Alex Woloch: But you also call attention to the idea of the turning point.
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Alex Woloch: It's a perfect example of that kind of political formalism, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah. No, right. I think it is a formalist --
Alex Woloch: Where there is no politics without turning points, but like what happens if we pull back and scrutinize that turn that's so --
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. You got it. Yeah. But could, could we push Sasha to answer the earlier question about --
Margaret Cohen: Please.
Caroline Levine: About the, about a sort of Frankfurt School version of the aesthetic? Like, you don't know. You don't have to commit. I'm just curious.
Sasha Starovoitov: I'm not entirely sure how to answer your question and speak for, like, an entire generation of readers, especially because I have, like, a limited interaction with -- my world is grad students.
Caroline Levine: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Sasha Starovoitov: So I've been partially, like, deformed by
[00:46:00]
that.
Caroline Levine: No, I'm really, really just talking about you.
Alex Woloch: What did the people on the Amtrak train say when they asked if we'd seen anything?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Actually, interestingly, these two young guys were talking about how they listen to audiobooks, but they don't read, and they feel guilty about it.
And I was like, I consider that reading, you know, I consider that, you know, they were like, no, no, I'm not a reader, you know, I only listen to audiobooks and they were doing it on the train. So uh, anyway, just to know whether you think that the --
Alex Woloch: Tried to deflect it.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: I know, I know, I, and I feel like I've asked the question wrong and if I asked, if I asked it right, you would have an answer, but it's sort of like, is the pragmatic appealing or is this idea of the aesthetic as a separate realm that you purposefully inhabit as not pragmatic is appealing.
Sasha Starovoitov: Is the pragmatic appealing, it's such a difficult question. And I think in part it also comes from the, so what I, okay, so if I am also to answer for kind of a
[00:47:00]
Generational, like, relationship to the pragmatic and the aesthetic and related to activism. I think when I look at the pragmatic, I come from a generation of individuals who have seen pragmatic solutions consistently fail at the institutional level I'm from a town that's like 30 minutes from Sandy Hook, so like I feel very so, so for me as my, like, if I'm to speak about, like, my own Individual formation as an activist that is where it starts and turning points. But the problem with that was that I grew up in a milieu that consistently approached pragmatic solutions towards gun control and then watched them fail at a national level over and over and over again.
And there is a desire, I think, for the aesthetic to remain somehow separate because if the pragmatic solution fails at the level of, like,
[00:48:00]
death and actual tragedy, what can the pragmatic in the aesthetic really do? What can the pragmatic in the aesthetic form really accomplish when something that is so horrifying in reality cannot accomplish?
And so seeing the failure of any solution, I think for me personally led me to want to actually reserve the aesthetic as a kind of aesthetic, not for a therapeutic reason. I think, like, the converse is that it's not that I see the aesthetic as therapeutic either in the kind of, like, escapist model, which I think is equally as kind of problematic in climate, specifically climate conversations about the role of narrative and the aesthetic.
But I think there's, there's a kind of more existential feeling about both pragmatism and the role of the aesthetics and that like, it feels at the end of the day that many fail in an activist
[00:49:00]
sense. That's a very pessimistic answer, and unfortunately, is, like, my own personal one, based upon where I came from.
Caroline Levine: It's very moving, and I think it's important, so I'm glad I pushed you to answer.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, no, of course.
Caroline Levine: I realize it was a lot of prodding, but thank you for that. That is very moving.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, thank you. And thank you all. It's just been really a thought provoking conversation, which I am going to take forward with me in my own conversations with people in environmental humanities, as well as, you know, my own conversations with myself, really looking forward to your talk in just about an hour.
Caroline Levine: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure.
Alex Woloch: Cool. Should we cut
[00:50:00]
tape?
[laughter, and outro music plays]