Episode 107: Transcript
Episode: 107: Academia, Dark and Light
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and society. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction. My latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:17] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who dreams about science and my latest book is Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak, the second book in a new young adult space fantasy trilogy.
Annalee: [00:00:28] Darkness is haunting academia and we’re here for it. Today we’re going to talk about the rise of the dark academia aesthetic, and how it’s showing up everywhere from shows like Dickinson, and Lovecraft Country to Ralph Lauren’s new line of clothing which is inspired by historically black colleges. Plus, there’s a million TikToks about how to wear tweed. It’s a fashion, it’s a vibe, it’s a way to tell stories, and it’s clearly a commentary on what’s happening to higher education in the west. We’ll be talking about all of that.
[00:01:00] And later in the episode, we’ll be joined by Ana Quiring, a postdoc in the English Department at Washington University. She wrote an amazing essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books last year about what it means to turn academia into an aesthetic.
[00:01:14] Also, on our audio extra next week, we’ll be talking about just a tiny topic, which is the future of the Humanities. That’s something that Charlie Jane and I both have a lot of personal feelings about as former academics and we’ll bring that all to you if you become a patron because it’s our patrons like you who get free audio extras every other week, that’s because this show, perhaps unbeknownst to you, is entirely listener supported through Patreon.
[00:01:45] So if you join our Patreon now you can help make this show happen. You can help pay for us to do research, you can help pay for our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti, to make every single episode wondrous and perfect. And if you join, you can be part of our Discord channel where we hang out all the time, and talk about how we feel about the new Doctor in Doctor Who and lots of other things that are maybe not quite as important as the new Doctor, but almost as important. So if you join up now, you can give us five bucks a month or a little bit more, or maybe a lot more, that'd be great. And you can make our opinions more correct. You can make this episode shinier and we will love you for it.
[00:02:23] All right, let's put on our poet shirts and start reading Sappho and Ovid.
[Soft but energetic classical piano music plays with the sound of rain in the background.]
[00:02:56] All right, I'm setting the vibe. This is from a dark academia playlist on YouTube, which is called, “You’re studying in a haunted library with ghosts.” It's racked up 11.5 million views since it was posted in January last year, which is kind of amazing. It was created by this person, Olivia Lee. And she has a bunch of other dark academia playlists, too, on YouTube and they all have these amazing titles like “You're falling for the antagonist in a fantasy novel,” or “You've just joined the Dead Poets Society.” And they really capture the mood of dark academia, which is focused on studying and reading and going to university.
[00:03:41] But they also evoke nostalgia for historical periods where people could just devote themselves to a life of the mind, you know, all alone in their garrets full of sad memories or actual literal ghosts in the case of that particular playlist.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:55] Yeah, so dark academia sounds really healthy and fun. But where does it come from originally? What's the origin of it?
Annalee: [00:03:55] So its origins are, frankly, pretty murky. But I think it's safe to say that the term “dark academia” was popularized almost entirely on social media. Mostly Instagram and TikTok, but also Tumblr before that. And even though dark academia is inspired by books and reading, it's really a visual style and it works nicely on image-driven platforms where people can just show off their librarian fashions or their cottagecore rooms heaped with books.
[00:04:32] In fact, cottagecore is another aesthetic that's often associated with dark academia, which is because it's just all about looking at the past with these very stylish rose-tinted spectacles. Or to put it in academic terms, dark academia is a revival of 19th century literary romanticism and the Gothic. Many of its literary touchstones are people like the poet Lord Byron, or Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe. Also pretty much any literary figure mentioned in the Dead Poets Society because that movie is incredibly crucial to the aesthetic.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:11] So obviously Dead Poets Society is ticking a lot of the boxes of dark academia. It’s a historical setting, it's about an elite prep school, and everybody is reading a lot of books. What are some of the other themes that we see popping up in these dark academia stories.
Annalee: [00:05:27] So a lot of fans point to Donna Tartt’s in 1992 book, The Secret History as sort of the ultimate dark academia book. It's about an outsider from a lower-class background who goes to an elite private school to study classics. And when he gets to this college, which is kind of modeled on Bennington College, he joins a secret group of classics students, and he discovers that they're involved in these bacchanalian rituals. There's incest, blackmail, multiple murders. And the story chronicles how this elite cadre of classic students’ lives sort of fall apart as they try to cover up these murders. And eventually, one of them commits suicide. Some of them go insane. And then the main character becomes this morose, brooding academic with a lot of secrets.
[00:06:21] You can see the fingerprints of The Secret History all over later dark academia stories, which almost always seem to feature a lower-class outsider who's trying to break into some sort of elite, wealthy group. But you also get this sort of theme of just humanities nerds turning into murderous weirdos, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:40] So it’s Gothic, in part, because there's transgression and murder, but it's also kind of glamorous and fun. And it's like, well, you know. So what are some more recent works that have that kind of vibe, including the murdery stuff?
Annalee: [00:06:57] The murder stuff, yes. Yes, there is a ton of stuff, including the recent huge bestseller by Olivie Blake called The Atlas Six. But others that are really obvious are Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, which is about an outsider-y character who's investigating secret societies at Yale and discovers a ton of supernatural shit is going on along with the usual bacchanalia.
[00:07:22] And also a lot of newer dark academia tales add this layer of magic and supernatural occurrences to their stories. Like there's the television series, The Magicians, which is about college students at an elite magic university. And I would also argue that Legendborn by Tracy Deonn fits this mold.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:41] Yeah. And of course, Tracy was a guest on the show in our episode about King Arthur and it was really amazing to talk to her about that book. I love Legendborn, in part because it shines a light on, basically UNC and Chapel Hill, and shows an outsider coming in and discovering all these secrets about this secret society that's tied to King Arthur. It's a really beautiful book and I'm so excited for the sequel.
Annalee: [00:08:08] And it's set in a school.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:10] Yeah. And so those are all books that kind of like revolve around studying and schools and stuff. What are some other things that maybe people wouldn't think of as being dark academia, but that actually are.
Annalee: [00:08:21] There's the incredibly popular show How to Get Away with Murder with Viola Davis in the role of the decadent law professor. How to Get Away with Murder is really similar to The Secret History in a lot of ways. Instead of classics students, there's an elite cadre of law students, and every season they have some kind of murder in their midst. And they're all just obsessed with impressing Viola Davis, as really we all should be.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:52] As anybody would be.
Annalee: [00:08:52] Right. And because she's this sort of commanding, almost mystical force, but she's also a chaos force. She's causing or she's adjacent to a lot of these murders.
[00:09:03] In some of these newer stories that I'm talking about, the outsider character is Black at a very white school. So that adds another layer to the class politics of this outsider character. And that leads me to another really great example of the dark academia aesthetic, which is the show Dear White People.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:26] I love Dear White People. It's such a great show. And it's definitely… it's got a secret society. It's got class and racial conflict at this very elite, fancy university with this long history. And everybody in the show seems to be a creative person. There's characters who want to be writers. And yeah, it's an amazing show.
Annalee: [00:09:45] It also has characters who, as you're saying, are haunted by history. Remember how the second season started with us learning about the history of the Black students’ residence hall.
DWP Clip: [00:09:56] 1837. Former slave quarters, Armstrong Hall and Parker House combined to accommodate Winchester’s influx of ethnic students, which at the time meant Irish and Italian. They lived there until sometime after the 1920s when they graduated to whiteness.
1965. Armstrong Parker House becomes the residence of choice for a burgeoning community of Black students. But not everyone approves, especially one, Donald Hancock, a student who would become a wealthy benefactor of right-wing politicians and Winchester herself.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:28] That's such an interesting scene.
Annalee: [00:10:32] Yeah, I love the narrator, who's played by Giancarlo Esposito. And he later reveals himself in that season, so spoilers. And he reveals that he's part of a secret society of Black academics at the university.
[00:10:44] And there's several other dark academia stories that I want to just mention briefly that deal explicitly with these kinds of racial dynamics. So Hidden Figures, obviously, does this a little bit, though, because Hidden Figures focuses on math and science and dark academia is more of a humanities-centric thing, I would say Hidden Figures is more of a of a sidebar.
[00:11:07] But one show that really hits it on the nose is Lovecraft Country. It's set in the mid 20th century. So you've got that historical style, that historical angle, and it's ultimately about a secret society of white people who are trying to steal Black people's magic.
[00:11:24] So it's not in an academic setting. But the main characters are all obsessed with books, specifically science fiction, and I love that early scene in the series where one of the main characters, Atticus, he’s just come back from the Korean War, and he runs into his old friend Leti, on the street, and they bond over being in the Southside Futurists Science Fiction Club together.
LC Clip: Leti: You just gonna stand there, Tic, or you gonna help me?
Atticus: Leti Loose.
Leti: Now only my friends get to call me that. We still friends?
Atticus: Well, considering you were the only female member of the Southside Futurists Science Fiction Club.
Leti: I was. [Laughs] I was.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:09] Yeah, and I love that these stories exist, because when I think of dark academia, especially when I think of some of the classic texts that we talked about, like Dead Poets Society, they're very white, very Eurocentric, very kind of fetishizing, a certain kind of privilege. So seeing it kind of opening up and seeing other people getting to be included in it is a really cool thing.
Annalee: [00:12:33] Yeah, I mean, a lot of the styles you see on Instagram are focused on European history and culture. It is very Dead Poets Society out there. It's very Oxbridge. Plus the kind of historical stories that inform the dark academia aesthetic would be things like the show the Gilded Age, or Bridgerton, or the series The Great, which is kind of a satirical take on the life of Catherine the Great.
[00:13:00] And, you know, some of the shows have a light sort of sprinkling of colorblind casting. Gilded Age has one pretty major supporting character who's Black, but there's no denying that these shows are largely about fetishizing upper class whiteness. Another great example is the series Dickinson, which is basically about America's darkest of dark academia poets, Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson Clip: Emily: I am a poet.
I'm going to write thousands of poems right here in this room, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
Annalee: [00:13:36] Never have I heard a more dark academia sentiment.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:41] Yeah, and part of what I love about Dickinson is the way that it sort of brings in a lot of like modern themes. There's, a hip hop influence in there and Wiz Khalifa shows up as Death. And later in the show, they kind of complicate things a little bit more and get away from just Emily in her garrett writing poetry and like everybody kind of obsessing about the life of the mind, because the Civil War happens and people start dying. And Black characters start actually criticizing her for wanting to disengage from what's going on in the world around her. And it kind of starts to poke a little bit more at the cracks in that idea of removing yourself from the world and just focusing on the life of the mind and creating poetry when there's real horrible stuff going on pretty much on your doorstep.
Annalee: [00:14:32] Yeah, I think that's kind of a microcosm of what's happening overall with the aesthetic, because dark academia is so much about fetishizing historical elite institutions, it makes sense that white people tend to show up a lot. But at the same time, these are also stories and styles for people who are academic outsiders. So that's where you get a story like Dear White People, which is about smart Black students just beating their heads against this racist white institution of basically a Ivy League school.
[00:15:03] At the same time, we're seeing the rise of a light academia approach to Black history too. In other words, it's an academia vibe, but it's more gentle and nostalgic with no monsters. And I'm specifically thinking of the aesthetics of the historically Black colleges and universities that Beyoncé popularized and recent performances. It's basically HBC light academia. And it's everywhere.
[00:15:27] There's this lavish photo spread in a recent O Magazine showing Ralph Lauren's fall clothing line, which is entirely modeled on clothing worn at HBCUs, like in the mid 20th century. And I mean, I love those fashions, it's a delight to watch. And it's, you know, it's spilling right out of Instagram into mainstream department stores.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:52] That is awesome. And I really love that. And I love the idea of light academia, because it sort of implies a little bit more of a coziness.
Annalee: [00:15:59] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:59] A show that I've been obsessed about recently that you and I have been watching together is The Owl House, which is on Disney+. And it's about a girl named Luz, who comes from Earth, but then she travels to a magical realm where she kind of goes to magic school. And there's a lot of like the dark academia or like dark-ish academia hallmarks, but it's such a light, fun, kind of gentle show, about this girl going on this adventure and getting to make friends and getting to live with a witch and a cat-like demon creature named King. In this house, that's actually like, made of—
Annalee: [00:16:36] Owl house!
Charlie Jane: [00:16:37] It's like a house with an owl, that's a sentient owl that is the house. It's so delightful. And she does go to school. And it's very kind of like, friendly. It's a friendly show.
[00:16:49] Another thing that might, I guess be considered light academia that I have loved recently is the novel, Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman, which is about an archivist who is kind of studying the papers of someone who recently died. And he's a trans guy. He's also a vampire. So he's a couple of different flavors of outsider and he has a couple of different ways in which he has a hard time fitting in. But he kind of retreats into this world of just kind of going through someone's collection and kind of processing their life and sense of it. And it's definitely about studying being a refuge from a world that doesn't understand you, which I think is something that I deeply identify with.
Annalee: [00:17:33] Yeah, and I think it still has a lightness because it's a romance, ultimately, Dead Collections.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:38] Yeah, it’s a romance and it’s—
Annalee: [00:17:39] It has these dark academia aesthetic elements in the same way The Owl House does, but it's in the service of a story that's very much about love and renewal and hope, as opposed to something like The Secret History, which is like, literally everyone dies or goes crazy or has a horrible life. So it feels very different.
[00:18:02] There's a big question, I think, about why dark academia has become so popular currently, even though obviously, the dark academia style goes back, perhaps even centuries. And I think it's really partly about the pandemic. You know, a lot of other critics besides me have talked about how this style really got going in 2020, and really just exploded across social media.
[00:18:32] And there was even, you know, a New York Times Style section story about dark academia in 2020. So, you know it was not just mainstream, but maybe starting to get a little tired. And it seems clear that school became a focus of dark obsession around that time, because so many students weren't able to go away to college, and they were just yearning for it and romanticizing it.
[00:18:57] But obviously, dark academia was gaining popularity before the pandemic, too. So the pandemic was just enhancing something that was already happening.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:06] Besides the pandemic, what else was happening that might make people gravitate towards this idea?
Annalee: [00:19:13] Yeah, Zoe Robertson had an interesting piece in Book Riot about how dark academia is a fantasy of class privilege. And you and I have been talking about this already. And she points out that simply being able to afford university is a privilege. But that many of these stories push privilege to just an absurd extreme, because these are people who are so wealthy that they can get away with murder. And if they fail their classes because they just want to like flop down under the trees and read Donna Tartt, well, their parents can get them fancy jobs anyway.
[00:19:48] So it's this fantasy of just pure unmitigated privilege. And at the same time, I think the dark academia aesthetic reveals how much higher education is just in a shambles right now. Most schools are dealing with funding problems and there's really only a few elite private institutions that are just absolutely thriving at our current moment.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:12] Yeah, and without getting too deep into it, I think that people doing remote learning kind of made them realize how much of the traditional academic experience is both a luxury and kind of unnecessary in some ways. You can learn a lot over Zoom or over YouTube. And you know, meanwhile, liberal arts education does feel kind of like a historical fantasy, it feels like something that is out of reach for most people now. So I guess it makes sense that that would become something that people would kind of fantasize about and kind of roleplay, in a way.
Annalee: [00:20:49] Yeah, it's also a fantasy about just having the time to hang out and yawp about poetry like the rich white boys in Dead Poets Society, right. Amelia Horgan wrote this essay in Jacobin Magazine late last year, where she pointed out that dark academia is appealing partly because it focuses on slowing down and having lots of time to study. It's an escape from what you might call productivity fetishism in late capitalism, where you have to work as fast as possible, and hold down three jobs. Just simply being able to read a book all day, that's luxury. You're rich in time, which is tremendous privilege.
[00:21:32] Alright, so we're gonna come back after the break and talk to Ana Quiring, who knows all about the privileges and the pleasures of dark academia.
[00:21:46] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:21:48] Here's a podcast I know you're gonna love. It's called Talk Nerdy and it's hosted by Cara Santa Maria.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:53] She's worked for the past 15 years as a science communicator and is currently a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology.
Annalee: [00:22:02] Whoa. So she shares her love of the scientific method on TV shows like National Geographic’s Brain Games, podcasts, like The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. And in books, social media, you name it. She is there telling you all about why science is great.
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Annalee: [00:22:42] It's really true. I listen to it all the time. And she's a great interviewer, she always brings out the most intriguing discoveries from her guests. So what are you waiting for? You should subscribe to Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria, wherever you get your podcasts. Right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:59] Right now.
[00:23:02] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:23:06] Ana Quiring is a postdoctoral researcher in English at Washington University in St. Louis. Ana’s research interests include 20th century British and anglophone literature, feminism and queer theory. Her current research project, diet patriotism focuses on the intersection between nationalism and fatphobia.
[00:23:25] Welcome, Ana.
Ana Quiring: [00:23:27] Thank you so much for having me.
Annalee: [00:23:30] So I want to start by talking about your article about dark academia in the LA Review of Books. It was such a great piece and you made a ton of awesome points. And I wanted to get you talking about what it means that academia has become an aesthetic. What is an aesthetic? And how is it different from say, like a trope or a genre?
Ana Quiring: [00:23:51] Yeah, absolutely. I was really interested in the work that goes on to sort of codify aesthetics on social media, especially the beloved, outdated Tumblr, as well as places like Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok now, especially. And to me, I think the difference between an aesthetic and a trope or a genre is that an aesthetic isn't defined by a narrative structure, the way we think of tropes or genres having rules of what happens in a story.
[00:24:20] An aesthetic is more like I think of it as sort of like a collage, or an accumulation of images or other pieces of media, music, things like that. And they have to be next to each other. So like an aesthetic sort of comes to be through comparison and juxtaposition.
[00:24:34] And I think Tumblr is a really great example of this because of that reblog function. It's all about curation and collection, not necessarily producing whole new pieces of media. So the way that dark academia really came to be, for me, at least in this way, is a picture of a tweed blazer doesn't really mean anything on its own. But if you put it next to a picture of an Oxford College green and the next to another picture of a dusty old book, and a quote from Hamlet, these images start to sort of come together as an aesthetic. And it has a sort of sensibility quality.
[00:25:06] And then we also have this emerging sub genre of dark academia writing and film. We sometimes think of The Secret History by Donna Tartt as kind of the ur-text of that sub-genre. But I think of that literary genre as ultimately coming out of the aesthetic. And I really like foregrounding the aesthetic because aesthetics are something that girls do, high school girls, and queer people of all kinds. And so there's a kind of, high school girl bedroom wall quality to the aesthetic that I really like.
Annalee: [00:25:39] That totally makes sense. And I'm wondering, well, first, before we get into kind of the politics of this aesthetic, can we talk a little bit about the billions of different flavors of the academia aesthetic? Because there's… so there's dark, there's light, but then there's like goblin and chaos and fae and tell us about all the academias.
Ana Quiring: [00:26:02] I could not pretend to be an expert on all of them, I think. And like how much is goblincore, its own aesthetic versus part of academia. I think probably the two that are sort of the most central to that are dark academia and light academia. And this is like, is there a blood spatter from an ancient Greek-inspired murder on your tweed vest? Or are you wearing your butter yellow cardigan, I think is the image I use in the piece. So there's like both literal light and dark and it also has to do with thematic, right? So dark academia, especially major literary texts, like If We Were Villains and The Secret History have to do with like Shakespearean tragedy and ancient Greek tragedy and these sort of dark morbid themes, where light academia, you're reading more…. Like A. Houseman like the pastoral imagery, I guess. I mean, like Wordsworth.
Annalee: [00:26:57] I feel like it can border on like romance, like school romances and that kind of thing.
Ana Quiring: [00:27:03] Yeah and I was thinking about that in continuity with other kinds of quote, unquote, “aesthetics.” I think probably the other big one is cottagecore. And I think what they all share is this interest in sort of old-fashionedness as a way to romanticize everyday life, scenery, doing things the slow way, certain kinds of approachable aspects of that.
[00:27:22] And what I like about it is that I there's sort of two different scales of it for me and I talk about this in the piece that there's both this professional photographer photographing King's College Chapel at Cambridge. It’s a place that not a lot of people get to be. But you can also do dark academia by putting an Instagram filter from your iPhone photo of like your cup of tea and your book. And that experience costs like $6. Right. So there's, I think, I like this, the scalability of it, and the way that you can sort of romanticize your own morning routine, as a both aesthetic and intellectual exercise without literally having to be present at Cambridge. Which is sort of getting into the politics. But I think cottagecore has the same sensibility, like whether or not you get to be at a thatched roof cottage, you can wear your embroidered vest, or whatever, and have your pot of basil. So I think that, to me, is what is really fun about it, and what I've always loved about that Tumblr world.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:19] I find this sort of fascinating as somebody who, my parents were both college professors. I grew up on college campuses, and I never in a million years would have thought that academia would become like an aesthetic that young people would gravitate towards. It just always seemed like this kind of slightly charming, but embarrassing kind of thing that was out of touch with the world and kind of, you know, rooted in a lot of… Well, we can talk about that in a minute, but a lot of problematic stuff. And increasingly irrelevant, I guess I would have said.
[00:28:47] So how does something that is so literally old school, like old school in every sense of the term, how does that become aspirational for young people?
Ana Quiring: [00:28:57] That's a great question. I think something I'm interested in doing in my research, in general, in feminist studies, is working against the assumption that new is always better or more progressive or more accepting. And I think we have this idea of like transphobia must be this new, or that trans rights are this new concept, and that the further back you go, the more repressed it would be. But I think in a lot of terms, as TERFs is like a relatively new phenomenon like that is like bad newfangled feminism. It's not feminism at all.
[00:29:29] But so I'm really interested in the way that we might turn to moments or places in the past and find a kind of affinity with them that we don't even feel in the present, that like we are not the most liberated and free to express ourselves in the moment, especially in the university, that we've ever been. And so we see these images of the university in days past and find just thinking about reading as something you could do for pleasure or learning as a kind of self-satisfying enterprise rather than something you’re sort of frantically swimming with the preparation of like the moment I'm done here, my loans are gonna kick in.
[00:30:06] And so I think of the historical university as a kind of romanticized place before capitalism got so late in a lot of ways. And I think certain kinds of media really embody that too. Like, I think a lot of the dark academia texts that we really value have great adaptions of them, especially if they're not sort of meta dark academic texts, like something like The Secret History is, but something that's actually historical like, I really love Maurice by E.M. Forster, which has a great—
Charlie Jane: [00:30:33] Ahhh.
Ana Quiring: [00:30:33] So good. And it has this beautiful Merchant Ivory movie where you just get to, like, hang out at Cambridge and see all the great old clothes. And so there's that sort of visual of times gone by and like, Hugh Grant looking like a beautiful lesbian, because it's 1989. And it's amazing.
Annalee: [00:30:51] Yeah, that's what I love about the movie, Another Country, which is from the ‘80s. And it's another British prep school, and it's got all of the foxy boys who later become important British actors later on.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:03] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:31:03] Like, they're all having, well, they're not even having sex. They're just sort of smooching at…
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] They're just gazing smolderingly.
Annalee: [00:31:09] At prep school. Yeah. So this kind of brings up this sort of central question, I think, in the article that you wrote about how dark academia is kind of, as an aesthetic, it's kind of this democratizing force. And you've kind of been touching on that a little bit with the idea of people being able to just turn their coffee cup in the morning into something that's this elevated aesthetic. And I wonder if you could talk more about what does it mean for an aesthetic to be in a democratizing force? And also why that's helpful?
Ana Quiring: [00:31:41] Yeah, I think a lot of my interest in the aesthetic comes out of feelings of frustration, and to a certain extent pessimism about where actual academia is going. And I say this as someone who has been on the academic job market recently. So I think both for career academics and for undergraduate students, we have this sense that these institutions are sometimes hostile to the people that are in them. They're increasingly expensive. And I think my students feel a lot of pressure to be pre-professional in everything that they do. The sense that they need to pursue a practical degree, so that they can pay off their loans and be successful and survive in our economy.
[00:32:24] And so the university really gets instrumentalized as this sort of corporatizing force. And what I really like about dark academia is that it preserves the value of the humanities. A certain like, sort of, quote, unquote, “soft skills,” but you know, my defining trait as a person, is English major. I'm not proud of that, but it's just true. And I think for the English majors of us all, there is an idea that just getting to exercise or express that as an inherent value, or something that connects people to each other, is really wonderful. And it sort of pushes back against that pressure to instrumentalize everything we do to profit on it or to survive on it.
[00:33:03] And I think what's really complicated about that is that a lot of the people who do get to major in those humanities disciplines are people who are not as worried about loans. A humanities degree can feel like a luxury product that only certain people have access to.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:21] Ah, man.
Ana Quiring: [00:33:22] I know, it's awful. But you know, it's really hard to convince people to become English majors, which I want to do if they're like, I need to… I have parents that might need my support someday like, I'm going to need income, and what kind of income, can you ensure me. And we're always trying to convince them that English is there. But I think it's interesting to think about ways that you can have that kind of affinity between people and do that kind of study, in a way that's not beholden to that extremely expensive corporate university model.
[00:33:53] And I started thinking about dark academia as a way to enjoy the humanities, and their aesthetic trappings without the sort of structure of an institution deciding how you do that. It also means you get to express it on its own terms, right? So you don't have to read the traditional great books curriculum, or you read really promiscuously. That was something I really wanted to do with, I might, you know, at some point, teach a dark academia class where you'd have like, you know, Ovid and The Secret History, and like Dracula and Twilight, or something like that. But high culture and low culture get to live together and they can form each other. And you don't have to read them in the sort of traditional historical conservative ways, but you can be a messy, emotional, whole-self reader of these sort of exalted texts.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:41] So what is it that makes dark academia a queer aesthetic? Specifically, what's queer about it?
Ana Quiring: [00:34:46] I think there's a lot of answers. One is that I don't think it necessarily has to be because I think the aesthetic can definitely romanticize some old school and conservative literary eras. But I also think… I've been thinking about it. I think there's two reasons. One is, from the ancient Greeks on we have all of these very canonical texts that have been very invested in homoeroticism. So it's certainly baked into the canon in a way that previous generations haven't always acknowledged. So we've got beautiful queer readings of Shakespeare plays and things like that.
[00:35:18] But I think the even more important thing is that school is where gay stuff happens, right? Like the places that we romanticize in dark academia are generally college and like boarding school, so it's the first time that you're away from your parents, and you're with peers of your own, often peers of the same gender. And so I think what we're romanticizing, and this is true, even of like Harry Potter is that it's like a place where you are with people of your own age and sort of free to express all different kinds of intimacy in those relationships.
[00:35:18] And you've got all those private little corridors on those campuses, I think it makes for this, like, very homoerotic environment. And I was thinking of Maurice, too, and Another Country, which I also loved. The same goes for Brideshead Revisited, right? That you go off to college and have a kind of queer awakening, and that your sort of classical Western, be like the Greeks education is a part of that. And I really hope that as we continue to enjoy this trend, we also make it less entirely Eurocentric and we have other modes for, you know, like Alice Walker always says, like, Black women were experiencing many forms of queer connection to each other way before Sappho ever existed. So we have these non-Eurocentric roots of that homoerotic tradition as well.
Annalee: [00:36:40] I love that. So as you were saying earlier, you're working in academia, and you're in the humanities. And so I'm wondering if dark academia is a metaphor for what's happening in universities right now? Like, what is it kind of telling us? What is the metaphor unveiling?
Ana Quiring: [00:36:59] I mean, I think you can read that phrase, literally, and be like, the title of the piece was “What’s Dark About Dark Academia? Yeah, so I think—
Annalee: [00:37:07] Darkness. What is the darkness?
Ana Quiring: [00:37:12] Oh, I mean, I think all of us who work in academia have this like incredibly melancholic, ambivalent relationship to it, because we wouldn't be here if we didn't love it and feel connected to it in some way. And yet, at the same time, we're very aware of the flaws and it hurts us and it hurts other people, too. So one of the ways that I've been thinking about this, especially recently, is to really emphasize the more Gothic or supernatural elements of the genre, which I don't do as much in the piece. But thinking about texts about haunted universities and more supernatural things.
[00:37:43] So I really enjoyed Mariama Diallo’s, movie Master, which came out this year, as well as the Leigh Bardugo book Ninth House, which I think is like very much along the same lines. And thinking about the literally haunted university as a kind of metaphor for the trace of institutional violence. So that certain kinds of people are getting sacrificed to the flaming hell mouth of the university in order to make it run. And to sort of feed its id and its powerful students, and all those kinds of things.
[00:38:12] And I think that is the most sort of Gothic account of it. But it's true in much more ordinary ways, too, and just the way that funding gets redistributed towards business schools and away from other kinds of trends. So I think there's a lot of, you know, I could go on and on about adjunctification and other kinds of crises in higher ed. And I think that, to me, is what's really valuable about this aesthetic is that it both expresses and articulates that darkness, but also offers us a way to sort of reframe it in a way that wrests some of that power back for ourselves.
Annalee: [00:38:47] Yeah, because people are able to imagine themselves pursuing things that are academic or intellectual, but they don't have to be in the university. It can just be in their living room, right? They can just do it anywhere. And they can take a picture of the book and take a picture of themselves studying it, and they don't need a university to give them a stamp of approval to be doing that and sharing that.
Ana Quiring: [00:39:10] Absolutely. And it’s almost like a hack in some ways. I think of this and just like, you know, professors deciding to put their syllabi up online. You can go check those books out. And like, be… And it's hard to do when there's like, a lot of other pressures on your time, but that you can pursue education and learning and self-betterment and community through those things, through all different kinds of book clubs without paying $50,000 a year.
Annalee: [00:39:38] Yeah, I really love that. I want to end by doing something very dark academic, which is giving our listeners some reading material. I know that you study 20th century lit and maybe you've even looked at the 19th century. I know they made me do that when I was studying 20th century lit. So what are some of the literary texts that you see as being kind of foundational to the genre. Things that are historical not like, you know, The Secret History, like should we be reading The Well of Loneliness?
Ana Quiring: [00:40:14] The Well of Loneliness is a fascinating, frustrating book, which isn't about academia. It's just about lesbians treating each other badly. So that's interesting in its own way, but—
Annalee: [00:40:24] Yeah, it’s the Beebo Brinker genre?
Ana Quiring: [00:40:26] Yes, yes. I learned about that recently. Um, I have to go with some of my… I think I would go back to the Brontës in a lot of ways for that Gothic sensibility. And I love Jane Eyre. There's nothing better than Jane Eyre but I also really like Charlotte Brontë’s last novel Villette, which is a little bit more legitimately dark academia because the main character is a teacher. And there is also a haunted crossdressing nun, I can promise in that book.
Annalee: [00:40:51] Nice.
Ana Quiring: [00:40:51] Which is incredible. I also mentioned Maurice. I think a lot of that early 20th century, sort of like Cambridge-y stuff like that. Maurice by E.M. Forster and Brideshead Revisited, which is also a really fun book with great adaptions. And then I was also thinking about Virginia Woolf, because I'm always thinking about Virginia Woolf, who is a little bit less of a pleasure read, but I think she's really writing and she gave these speeches, in her most famous work A Room of One's Own at women's colleges at Cambridge before, women were welcome in the main body of Cambridge. Talking about their limited access to, and she talks about the greens and the hallways, and the chapels and all those things. So I think she's really articulating the sort of exalted myth of the university space from a feminist perspective in a way that we're still invested in now. And she's doing it, you know, fully 100 years ago.
Annalee: [00:41:44] Cool.
[00:41:46] I wanted to ask you a question, which is, what do you think about the idea of Frankenstein as dark academia because the monster is trying to learn about how to be a person by standing outside this house watching like a family teach their kids. So it's like an outsider academia experience, although they're not really they're not reading the classics. The monster’s just learning how to like eat and stuff.
Ana Quiring: [00:42:12] But isn't the monster like obsessed with Milton, like his entire personality is based on Paradise Lost? Having a bad time while reading Paradise Lost is like the definition of dark academia.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:21] Yes.
Ana Quiring: [00:42:22] That’s all it is.
Annalee: [00:42:22] Okay, so it's okay, if we put that on our list, too.
Ana Quiring: [00:42:25] Oh, absolutely. And I think like, in general, the sense that we're still invested in Frankenstein, a 200 year old book as like a major cultural touch point, or like the fact that there's like this Dracula daily thing going on online right now, which I don't really know much about. But that these certain texts, which are old, musty, long novels that were originally published in three volumes, that they're still part of our cultural repertoire, like that's dark academia, the fact that we've repurposed something from high culture in this incredibly irreverent and silly way to great fun effect. I think that is the pleasure of the genre to me in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:02] So what I'm kind of hearing is that since dark academia is an aesthetic, rather than a genre, or rather than a series of tropes, it can mean what people want it to mean, to a certain extent. And it's very flexible. It's basically just like, if you feel like it's dark academia, it is. Is that accurate?
Ana Quiring: [00:43:20] I think so, yeah. It's about the sensibility. I think if I had to boil it down, it would be like, the aesthetics of the university and also about reading promiscuously or reading irreverently?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:32] Awesome. I love that. And it can be either one of those two things, right? Or both?
Ana Quiring: [00:43:36] Usually both. Hopefully both.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:39] Okay, cool.
Annalee: [00:43:39] All right. I think that's a great place to end go out and read promiscuously.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:43] I love that phrase. I want that on a t-shirt.
Annalee: [00:43:48] I know, me too.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:49] I really want that on a t-shirt.
Annalee: [00:43:48] Thank you so much for joining us, Ana.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:49] Thank you so much, Ana.
Annalee: [00:43:51] Where can people find your work online?
Ana Quiring: [00:43:54] You can follow me on Twitter at @AnaQuiring. And yeah, I'm working on a new essay about queer historical romance novels right now. So be on the lookout for that.
Annalee: [00:44:06] Awesome. Okay. Thanks very much.
Ana Quiring: [00:44:07] Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:10] Thank you. Bye.
[00:44:10] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Ana Quiring: [00:44:13] Thanks for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember, you can find us and support us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod.
[00:44:24] Thank you a bunch to the amazing Veronica Simonetti who is doing all of this from her own personal studio in Brooklyn. And thank you so much to Chris Palmer for the music. If you like this, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts. It just helps people find us and makes us feel good when we see that people actually stuck a frickin’ review up there. And if you become a patron, if you are a patron we'll see you on Discord. Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:44:55] Bye!