Siri Hustvedt

Blogs
Apr 2018

Los Angeles Review of Books

Antonio Damasio, Feeling, and the Evolution of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio has been an influential and highly regarded neuroscientist for decades, not only in his field but beyond it. As a person who roams among disciplines, I have seen his and his frequent co-author Hanna Damasio’s work referenced by scholars from anthropology to psychology to literary studies. In The Strange Order of Things, he sets out to do nothing less than tell the story of the evolution of mind and culture through his central, organizing theory of homeostasis.

Blogs
Feb 2018

CNN

“We Need to Talk About Erotic Art”

Twenty-nine years ago, a group of anonymous feminist artists known as the Guerrilla Girls unveiled a poster that read, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."

Blogs
Nov 2016

The Guardian

“We are witnessing the politics of humiliation” - Siri Hustvedt, Joyce Carol Oates and more on the US election

There is an old phrase often credited to the American demagogue Huey Long, but which was actually written by an obscure American professor: “When fascism comes to America, they will call it Americanism.” It has come, and it has come by public vote. I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.

Blogs
Oct 2016

Tagesschau

“I'm Afraid of a Trump Win”

An interview with WDR, German public broadcasting's editor in chief Sonia Mikich, published in Tagesschau.

Clinton vs. Trump: Reason against the emotion, worldliness against paranoia. What's going on in the US?

Blogs
Dec 2015

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”

“The Spectacle of Skill” is a compilation of selected writings by Hughes with new material from the unfinished memoir he was working on when he died in 2012. The collection’s title is taken from a passage in an earlier book about his life, in which he tells the story of the horrific car accident that nearly killed him in Australia in 1999, as well as the legal wrangling and lurid press coverage that followed. His fellow Aussies in the media cast him as “a vile elitist,” an uppity, vainglorious her­etic to the egalitarian faith of the continent known as Oz.

Blogs
Feb 2012

The New York Times “Opinionator”

“Reliving the Crash”

In August of 2002 I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself, only its aftermath.

Blogs
Apr 2010

The New York Times “Opinionator”

“What is Sleep?“

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia I have sometimes slept without knowing it. The thoughts of waking seem to mingle with thoughts that may be part of sleep. Has the clock moved too quickly? Did I doze off?

Blogs
Mar 2010

The New York Times “Opinionator”

“Night Lights, Blankets and Lullabies”

I remember a lamp that stood on the floor in the opened doorway to the bedroom where my sister Liv and I slept. My mother put it there every night so the darkness would never be total. This is an old memory and around it are the usual fogs that dim recollection, but the light offered the hope that blackness would not snuff out the visible world entirely during my anxious transition to sleep.

Blogs
Mar 2010

The New York Times “Opinionator”

“Failing to Fall”

The narrator of Chaucer’s poem, “The Book of the Duchess,” cannot sleep. As his fitful thoughts come and go, he lies awake. He hasn’t slept for so long, he fears he may die of insomnia. But what is the reason for his sleeplessness? “Myselven can not telle why,” he says.

Blogs
Mar 2010

Psychology Today “A Novelist's Take on Mental Health. Reading Minds: Method or Muddle?”

“A Mental Problem?”

I've been puzzling over an old question. What is mental? What is physical? The most recent DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders IV) describes the separation of mental and physical as "a reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism." That dualism—we are made of two things: spirit and matter—is very old, but it is a philosophical conundrum of the most befuddling kind, and the authors of the DSM want to make it clear that they haven't fallen into that trap.