In this month’s interview, Public Discourse’s managing editor, Alexandra Davis, interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. The two discuss the development of the modern self-help movement and the less-than-desirable fruits of a culture whose consciousness has been shaped by the notion that reality is not discovered, but made.
Alexandra Davis: What initially sparked your interest in this topic?
Tara Isabella Burton: My doctoral research at Oxford was in theology, but specifically it was in the theology of Dandyism. So I was looking at nineteenth-century decadence, particularly in France, and the idea of the person who creates their life as art. I was looking at a particular nineteenth-century phenomenon, but I was particularly interested in the relationship between technological modernity and the idea of art and self-creation as something that was both seemingly a resistance to mass production and urbanization, but also very much a modern theological statement about the self vis-à-vis a natural world or a divinely created world that had meaning outside of what the self makes it. A lot of these later figures were also influenced by philosophical currents, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and so that dynamic was something that I really loved exploring.
After I finished my doctorate, I came to New York, where I’m from, started working for Vox.com as a religion journalist, and wrote my first nonfiction book, Strange Rites, which is much more about the “spiritual but not religious.” It’s more of a contemporary book. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do for a follow-up to Strange Rites, I thought about this idea that, particularly in the internet age, we think of ourselves as our own gods, we want to curate our own bespoke realities. And I realized that a lot of this historical material would be relevant to a much more contemporary story, and so that was the genesis of Self-Made.
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