{"id":126667,"date":"2024-02-06T12:20:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-06T17:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=126667"},"modified":"2024-02-06T17:44:15","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T22:44:15","slug":"pd-reality-is-discovered-not-made-an-interview-with-tara-isabella-burton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=126667","title":{"rendered":"(PD) Reality Is Discovered, Not Made: An Interview with Tara Isabella Burton"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this month\u2019s interview,\u00a0<\/i>Public Discourse\u2019s\u00a0managing editor, Alexandra Davis, interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of\u00a0<\/i>Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians<\/a>. 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.<\/i><\/p>\n

Alexandra Davis:\u00a0<\/b>What initially sparked your interest in this topic?<\/p>\n

Tara Isabella Burton:\u00a0<\/b>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-\u00e0-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.<\/p>\n

After I finished my doctorate, I came to New York, where I\u2019m from, started working for Vox.com as a religion journalist, and wrote my first nonfiction book,\u00a0Strange Rites<\/i>, which is much more about the \u201cspiritual but not religious.\u201d It\u2019s more of a contemporary book. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do for a follow-up to\u00a0Strange Rites<\/i>, 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\u00a0Self-Made<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

https:\/\/t.co\/3s6AXPhTOa<\/a> As this idea of self-creation has become seen as the fundamental element of human life, that means those of us who participate more fully in self-creation are more human, and those of us who participate less fully are, in some sense, less human.<\/p>\n

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) February 1, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n