Most days, she tools with words. At other times, she's immersed in projects of a more physical kind. Now working on her fourth and fifth books, Bartsch has had more success with the mechanics of masterpieces. With texts, it's different. There's not a sense of mastery but of seeing what kind of meaningful narrative can be formed out of another narrative.
Literary criticism is more about creation than about discovery.
The ancient philosophers, she argues, connected these concepts in much more deliberate ways than most scholars have recognized. The ancients thought that when you were seeing, your eyes were either emitting or receiving waves of tangible particles. The exchange of a gaze with a lover was even treated in some texts as tantamount to a sexual act. And believing that rays from your eyes were being reflected back on you, she continues, fostered the notion that when you looked at a love object, you were really seeing yourself. Bartsch, who has lived in Iran, Switzerland, the Fiji Islands, and Indonesia, is used to taking fresh approaches to some of the classics' seemingly tired topics.