When Sophie Gee’s husband was suddenly rushed to hospital, her life was plunged into uncertainty.
Amid the chaos, she discovered a surprising source of strength: her study of classic literature, and in particular, the works of Jane Austen.
Sophie, who was Associate Chair of the English Department at Princeton until she came to the University of Sydney as a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow, says stories have made her more resilient. “Literature teaches us how to be uncertain, how to tolerate discomfort, how to tolerate difficulty,” she says.
Arts and humanities degrees sometimes get a bad rap, but Sophie argues they are more valuable than ever in the age of AI.
She says stories cut through in a way science cannot – just look at the documentary My Octopus Teacher – and equip you with the skills you need to have “truly transformational ideas”.
“Storytelling is one of the most important ways to have access and equity to new pathways. If you’re able to tell your story, you’re able to change your life.”
She also makes the case for returning to old favourites, whether it’s Shakespeare or Harry Potter. And she weighs in on the value of BookTok.
Sophie Gee is an alumna and a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney.
Mark Scott 00:01
This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to Elder's past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Confession time, I'm a dropout from the University of Sydney Law School. I mention it every now and again. Look, as much as I loved law, I found myself being pulled in a different direction, and I ended up in education. Sophie Gee was also partway through a law degree when she had second thoughts. What she really loved was reading books, and writing stories. Her father was a lawyer, so she went to him for advice. He told her to do an arts degree instead. Bounce forward a couple of decades, and Sophie is co-running the English department at Princeton, one of the great universities in the world. And she's also a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow here at the University of Sydney. Arts and humanities get a bad wrap. They are often seen as an indulgence. But these disciplines help us understand the world and other people in a deeper and richer way.
Sophie Gee 01:35
It's really important to think about story as a resource. Story as a way of being in other people's lives, in order to be in your own life in a skillful way.
Mark Scott 01:46
I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and this is The Solutionists. Sophie Gee, you study literature from the 18th century, how does that equip you to live life in a 21st century world?
Sophie Gee 01:59
So, the short way of thinking about literature and the reading of literature is that it teaches us how to be uncertain, how to tolerate discomfort, how to tolerate difficulty, and how, in effect, not to know.
Mark Scott 02:13
So, how have you found your wide and deep reading has equipped you for dealing with uncertainty in your own life?
Sophie Gee 02:21
So, the 18th century is a period of catastrophic global change. It's a period of enormous migration, globally. It's a period of vast changes in the way the workforce is organised. And it is also the period in which this incredibly seminal literary form, the novel comes into being. And this new literary form uniquely gets inside people's minds as never before. So, the first novel is Robinson Crusoe. And you see the rise of the novel going, until you get to Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice and those great early realist novels of the 19th century. So, that's the stuff I've been reading. And then what happens to me in my life, well, kind of the same stuff that happens to everyone in their lives. It's New Year's Day 2024, my husband Lev and I have gone out for a run. We'd had a few wines the night before thought we’d better,
Mark Scott 02:13
Work them off?
Sophie Gee 02:21
Work them off. And we're running up a hill, and Lev has intense chest pain, he sits down and he says, “I think that we need to get me to a hospital.” So, we believe that he's had a heart attack. He's in the hospital, he ends up being in the hospital for a week. His son is arriving from America on a flight that morning. They haven't seen each other for 14 months. My two children are wondering what the hell has happened. In other words, we’re plunged into complete not-knowing. And initially, I found myself, as I think everyone does in these circumstances, grabbing for certainties, asking the doctor “Will he be okay?” Saying to the children “Everything's going to go back to normal.” And, of course, one does need comfort and reassurance in these moments. But the real turning point comes, I think, when you recognise that I, as a humanist have actually been training for these moments my whole professional life, which is the art of not-knowing the art of being unsure. And instead of trying to push away the not-knowing, to use my training, to embrace it as a new way of being in my own life. And what these moments of, what we might call radical uncertainty, or radical not-knowing teaches, is that it is not in fact, certainty that ultimately brings us happiness. It's not in fact, an absence of discomfort that enables us to be in our lives in a good way. It's actually a capacity to be with discomfort with a certain kind of lightness or joy, or friendship, would be the quality. You sit with uncertainty and you let other feelings emerge alongside it. And those feelings include attachment. They include wondering if you're going to change some stuff about your life. They include a reorganising of the things that are most important about your life.
Mark Scott 05:15
Is it giving you a resilience and a strength in a mindset? Are you also drawing on stories that you've read? Characters that you've studied? Is it in a sense, a, a library of other people's experiences that you're drawing on, as well as the mindset that you know, you need to have now?
Sophie Gee 05:36
Yes, it's really important to think about story as a resource, story as a way of being in other people's lives, in order to be in your own life in a skillful way. I always go to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennett goes to visit Jane when she's ill, and she meets Mr. Darcy, for the first time. Jane is being hosted by Mr. Bingley, who she'll end up marrying. And this scene of visiting someone who's very ill is actually a scene of breaking a lot of social taboos, Elizabeth isn't supposed to go over there. She's not supposed to walk over through muddy fields. She's not supposed to arrive before breakfast. And so, what we're seeing in that moment is the way in which sometimes, the violation of social codes is actually what you need to do in order to be radically truthful and have radically truthful and honest relationships. And the reason I always go to Austen, is that she seems to be a very cosy writer, she seems to be a very familiar writer, but actually, I think she's a really, radically experimental writer. So, the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice most literary fans know:
Narrator 06:45
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Sophie Gee 6:50
It's often cited as the sort of early example of irony in English writing. And it is, but it takes on a completely different set of stories and dimensions when we happen to read the first sentence of the American Declaration of Independence from 1776, written about 15 years before Austin was writing Pride and Prejudice:
Narrator 07:16
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Sophie Gee 07:31
So, we realised that Austin's actually riffing on one of the most important statements about human freedom. And one of the most important statements about human freedom that is, is itself going to go radically wrong, and it's already going radically wrong.
Mark Scott 07:53
I think we can be in heated agreement that as, both as arts graduates of the University of Sydney, we're strong believers in arts degrees and studies in humanities.
Sophie Gee 08:02
We think arts is good.
Mark Scott 08:02
Think arts is good. There is a sense that in Australia, that can be viewed as a privileged position. If you're first in your family to do a university degree, perhaps it's a harder argument to - at home to win the argument that you want to do arts and that arts in Australia can sometimes be criticised as being, you know, too white, too privileged, too rich, if you like. How do we take on those issues and those perceptions?
Sophie Gee 08:31
It's so important that we do, because I think that storytelling is one of the most important, perhaps even the most important way to have access and equity to new pathways. So, if you're able to tell your story, you're able to change your life.
Steve Jobs 08:50
I didn't see it then. But it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Barack Obama 08:59
I was growing up in Hawaii. And I had two wonderful grandparents to help my mother. She was embarrassed sometimes to go to the store with food stamps, because she wanted to make sure that we had enough to eat.
Taylor Swift 09:12
They're saying I'm dating too much in my 20s? Okay, I'll stop. I'll just be single for years. Oh, they're saying my music is changing too much for me to stay in country music? Alright. Okay, here's an entire genre shift, and a pop album called 1989. Now, I'm being cast as a villain to you? Okay, here's an album called Reputation and there are lots of snakes everywhere. [Applause]
Sophie Gee 09:43
And that is an arts degree, in a nutshell. I'm thinking about moments where it's the telling of stories that has really changed human history and a great example would be The [Interesting] Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He was one of the first enslaved people to tell his own autobiographical story. And it's a harrowing and horrifying tale. Equiano was forcibly transported from the coast of Africa to the Americas. He was taken from his home, he was put on a ship, and he crossed the sea in intensely turbulent weather. And what he saw were people getting sick and dying, people starving. He saw really brutal corporal punishment. He saw fear, he saw suffering, he saw intense dislocation, and people not knowing what was happening to them. And then in his enslaved life in the Americas, he saw people working under really intolerable human conditions, with cruel masters and overseers and managers. And in telling the story, Equiano really transformed people's understanding of what the slave trade was, of what slavery was. And the point that I want to make here is that it's the telling of stories that that begins to change narrative. And, of course, that's in some ways, a highfalutin thing to say, to a first generation family, or a family for whom it's going to be an economic strain to send a child to university. At the same time, I do think that actually story is a capacity that cuts across other kinds of social and economic barriers. And I think it's really important to sort of reframe it in those terms.
Mark Scott 11:37
And that's the case almost with all the major pressing social challenges we face. Global warming, climate change would be another example of that. We often are wrestling with science, but how can you tell that science in a way that's compelling and also vastly expands the reach of that story and the impact of that story?
Sophie Gee 11:56
That's exactly right, and gives it a kind of magic, which pulls on people's hearts, but it also pulls on their whole, embodied emotional selves, and gives them a kind of investment in the outcome of the story.
Mark Scott 12:10
Well, a call to action for the world.
Sophie Gee 12:12
And a call to action. Yeah, yeah. So, Rachel Carson is very famous for her book, The Silent Spring, which was about the destructive effect of chemicals on ecosystems. Her earliest work, though, I think, in some ways, is even more interesting. She was a marine biologist, and she studied the coast of Maine, and ended up writing a trio of books, the best known of which is called The Edge of the Sea. And what he's describing there is the place at which, intertidal zone, the place at which the world of the ocean meets the world of the land, and how it's this interstitial place where life flourishes and thrives in a constantly changing, extremely volatile, and actually quite fragile environment. And how its edges, coastlines, the sides of rock pools, rock platforms, tidal banks, that is where we see this intense resilience and change across marine life and the life of the land. And she wrote about it in this extraordinarily beautiful and compelling prose. And it really, sort of, put marine biology on the map. And I think that that same type of very compelling story that brings a sort of scientific or conceptual problem to life in a very vivid way, would be something like the film My Octopus Teacher, where you have this encounter between a human and an animal. And what you see is this remarkable unfolding story of different forms of consciousness that appear to be completely unrelated, but that are actually deeply inter fused and interdependent.
Craig Foster 13:49
A lot of people say an octopus is like an alien. But the strange thing is, as you get closer to them, you realise that you're very similar in a lot of ways.
Sophie Gee 14:05
And they're all stories that make sense of material that's known to scientists and other kinds of thinkers through data. And to me, those kinds of stories continue to be enormously transformative and important.
Mark Scott 14:24
I mean, you are a highly atypical graduate who studied English literature and is now a Professor of English literature. Most people who studied English literature have gone on to a myriad of different fields, but in a sense, it's the the resilience that you get from having to take the capabilities you've got now and to go into a new area and come to mastery of a new area. That's what the whole new workforce is going to demand of people, right?
Sophie Gee 14:48
Absolutely. So, when you look at the list of the skills that they need for jobs of the future, what you're always seeing is problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, communication, EQ, and the capacity to tolerate ambiguity. Now, of course, you can get those qualities out of STEM, you can get them out of a business background, you can get them from the social sciences. What the humanities asks us to do in a unique way, is to get closer and closer to texts and objects. In other words, we use archives, not data. And the distinctive thing I think about the archive is that it is made by humans to reflect on human experience. So, it has that double perspective. How did humans make it? What's it reflecting on? To use a US example, because sometimes, that's the news that crosses my radar, of the Rhodes Scholars chosen this year in the US, more than 50% of them are doing combined degrees with a humanities and a STEM subject. And that was very striking because it was the humanities knowledge that had given them the capacity to transform their STEM ideas into something that seemed as though it would be really world changing.
Mark Scott 15:53
I think we're in heated agreement that we're not seeing the death of the humanities.
Sophie Gee 15:57
No.
Mark Scott 15:58
Do you think you can make an argument that the humanities will be more important than ever?
Sophie Gee 16:04
I think we should make the argument because if the strategies that we've been currently using to problem solve major issues in the sciences, in business, in world politics, if they could be solved within their disciplines that they would have been. I'm equally interested, actually, in people from non-humanities fields, like technology, engineering, the sciences, business, who have actually found themselves gravitating back to the arts and humanities as they've gone further and more deeply into their work. And it's a pervasive phenomenon. I've been listening, for example, to Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn talking about this. I've been listening to a very famous Professor of Psychiatry and Mind Sciences, Dan Siegel talking about this, the idea that only to think about things from the sciences and the social sciences is not enough, because what we're grappling with are deep problems and patterns of human behaviour.
Mark Scott 17:04
I'm interested, as you reflect on it, and as these, you know, if not spiritual texts, they're kind of sacred and important texts in your life, whether in fact you find as a reader, now, many years after you first read Pride and Prejudice, you're still discovering riches in Austen?
Sophie Gee 17:24
That's a really great question. Sort of, what's the value of rereading? What's the value of revisiting and being with something over a long period of time? And the shorter answer is constant learning, constant rediscovery. Because when you stay with something over a long period of time, you see yourself and you see the object in an entirely different light each time. And so, Austen, for me, is a very different Austen from the light and bright and sparkling author that she seemed to me when I first read her in my teens. I actually have a nice instance of that phenomenon of the rereading. So, I did my PhD at Harvard in the 90s. And I was taught by quite a famous literary critic, a man named Stephen Greenblatt who has written many books about Shakespeare, and he was a great one for an anecdote. And he was kind of showing off, he was talking about how he'd gone to the White House, and he'd met Bill Clinton. And one had the impression that he and Bill Clinton were having a pretty in-depth conversation. And Stephen Greenblatt turned to Clinton and said, “Well, what's your favourite Shakespeare play?” And Clinton apparently said, “It's Macbeth.” And Stephen Greenblatt said, “Ah, the play about the man with a very complicated relationship with his wife, who allows her to boss him around scheme and lead him into all sorts of wrongdoing.” And Clinton apparently paused for a moment and said, “That's an interesting read on Macbeth. I've always read it as a play about a man who didn't understand the consequences of his own ambition.” And I love that story for lots of reasons, partly because it shows -
Mark Scott 19:12
Insights into both.
Sophie Gee 19:13
Two very bright minds.
Mark Scott 19:15
Whereas now, I think King Lear is the prevailing metaphor for all of US politics, to shift to an election year.
Sophie Gee 19:20
Touché.
Mark Scott 19:15
We talk about the stories we also talk I think about you know, for arts and humanities, the skills and capabilities that students get when they study these disciplines and these areas. We’re at a time now we're increasingly wanting to quantify everything with data points, including human capital and time. What do you think the arguments are for a young person today who may have studied English at school, studied history at school, very interested in arts and humanities, should they make that further investment of studying arts and humanities at university?
Sophie Gee 19:53
I think the most important thing to say about arts and humanities is to go back to the moment in which the studia humanitatis, the concept from which the humanities is drawn, first came into existence, which was in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe. And the point of the humanities or the studia humanitatis, as it was imagined, by these late medieval, early Renaissance thinkers in Europe, was not to live in an ivory tower, not to live in a cloistered way, but actually to manage the world more skillfully. So, Machiavelli's The Prince, which is a famous text of political science, advice to rulers to leaders, is a text that's intended to use the insights of the humanities to intervene in power, to intervene in politics. Another good example would be Francis Bacon, who's thought of as being the originator of empiricism, the father of empiricism. And for him, humanism was a way of interrupting knowledge, he called it “breaking knowledge”, throwing away the paradigms that we think we have, so that we can create new ones. And always with the emphasis on uncertainty. Bacon said that “we must begin with uncertainty in order to get to knowledge.” So, in other words, what I'm trying to say about the humanities is that they're about being in the world, and they're about breaking or interrupting knowledge. Something I've been following a lot recently has been current work on neuroscience, and neuroplasticity. There's a lot of really interesting recent research that shows that the more that you can train your brain to go in different directions to follow ideas and follow skills that you haven't been trained in, the more likely you are to come up with truly transformative ideas.
Mark Scott 21:36
Sophie, you still find the great literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, very compelling and relevant to life today. What's your pitch to someone to discover or rediscover these classics?
Sophie Gee 21:49
I think, it is wonderful when you have the chance to read those texts from the past - old stuff. It's extraordinary, because effectively, what you realise is that the struggles that we're in now are the same struggles that people have actually been in for the last at least 500 years. And that the desire to know other minds more deeply, is a fundamental human impulse. It's actually not a fundamental human impulse to push away other minds. Well, it is also. But alongside that goes this profound curiosity into other minds and intimacy with other minds. And that's the story of reading old texts, I think. And I've actually had a year where I, it happens to be the case that because I've been working with kids in year 11 and 12, I've reread a lot of Shakespeare, so I reread Macbeth, I reread King Lear I reread Hamlet, I reread A Midsummer Night's Dream. I reread Twelfth Night, and they are astonishing texts, just immersively amazing descriptions of being human. And it was just exhilarating to reread them.
Mark Scott 22:55
What about, you know, pushing more for slow reading in a distracted age and going back to War and Peace? There's something about reading, War and Peace reading Proust, or even, even a kid reading all of Harry Potter that says, “Just get lost in a deep, rich story that you can't kind of rushed through, you've got to swim in it and be lost in it.” And does that do something for your headspace and the way you think? And the person you become that we need to be encouraging people to do?
Sophie Gee 23:33
There's no question. First of all, we know it from MRI scans and neuroscience, that slow reading that slow, deep, persistent encounters with texts or other objects that we have to study over time, make our brains healthy, and create neural pathways that that enable us to learn more, and to think more flexibly. And one of the things that has recently emerged from studies of the human brain and studies of human learning is that for real transformation to take place, for us to get from one paradigm to a completely new disruption, we have to make a vast cognitive leap from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and that's what reading is, that's what reading does. And when you read all of Harry Potter, or when you read all of Shakespeare, or when you sit in the classroom, and you have to encounter something that would otherwise be too difficult to read on your own. What is actually happening to you is that your brain is creating this capacity to stay steady and become creative with a problem that you don't know how to solve.
Mark Scott 24:46
So, what can a great teacher do for a student to, particularly in dealing with texts that are complex and demanding and may appear on the surface to be overwhelming?
Sophie Gee 24:54
What a great teacher can do is show students that they have everything they need to read the text. So, I teach some texts that, quite frankly, are pretty unreadable. I teach Paradise Lost. I teach The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser. I teach Beowulf. I teach The Canterbury Tales. I would challenge most people, including professors of English literature to sort of sit down and have a read of those texts. And the great joy for me as a teacher, is to sit with students who've never seen this language before and read the opening lines of Hamlet or The Canterbury Tales, and show the students that they actually know everything they need to know about the world to understand the text. And I do think you need to have a guide for that. And that's what great teachers do, they actually, to use the words of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, they allow people to see that there's nothing wrong with them. They allow people to see that their minds are already completely capacious and able to hold new ideas. And I think it's, you know, this problem of sitting with discomfort or the resistance that we have to sitting with uncertainty, I think is often a fear that when we are with the uncertain, we won't know what to do. And so, the great teacher, I think, is someone who shows us that we already have the skills
Mark Scott 26:14
I'm Mark Scott, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney and it's been great to speak to the University of Sydney alumna Sophie Gee. Sophie is the Associate Chair of the English Department at Princeton University.
Kaylie Dawe 26:28
Are the women and Pride and Prejudice written well? Considering this is a romance book about marriage, I truly did not think the women in this book stood a chance of being full, realistic women who were separate from the interactions with men, I was pleasantly surprised.
Sophie Gee 26:42
You know, BookTok is a good example of how we don't need to get all gloom and doom about the demise of reading. People can still read, and people are still very open to getting immersed in narrative.
Kaylie Dawe 26:54
There are so many women in this book, and yet they remain distinct. Each woman was important in her own bubble of existence, each was able to form her own opinion. Each had her own personality and her own story.
Sophie Gee 27:06
What it starts with, is building up that reading muscle, and it doesn't really matter how you build it up.
Mark Scott 27:16
Listening to Sophie reflect on how impactful a great teacher can be, Im reminded of my conversation with message Eddie Woo. So many more people would love maths if they had a teacher like him. Eddy has a rare ability to help his students connect with a subject that can feel very abstract.
Eddie Woo 27:34
I think every teacher of any subject but particularly mathematics has a responsibility and a privilege of being able to say “You don't know how this is connected to you, but let me show you.”
Mark Scott 27:47
You'll find our earlier episode with Eddie Woo on The Solutionists wherever you're listening right now. The Solutionists is the podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room. And our thanks to the technical staff here.
The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Sourcing/credit: My Octopus Teacher is a Netflix series and we thank Kaylie for her Book Tok example. Find her on Tik Tok @under_thebelljar
This episode was produced by Monique Ross with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. The executive producer is Kellie Riordan. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Thanks to the technical staff at the at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.