Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Are English Departments Killing the Humanities?

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Feisal G. Mohamed at Dissent…

The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments. There are several informed and important books on those economic realities, of which Stanley Fish provides a partial bibliography in a recent blog post and David A. Bell provides a review essay in the Fall 2010 print issue of Dissent. We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted. But even as we strain against such pressures, we can engage in difficult self-scrutiny. We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame. And any such consideration must look squarely at that elephant in the olive grove, the English department, and ask if it does more harm than good.

This upstart institution has had a brief if also voracious life. Professorships of English language and literature began to appear in earnest in the late nineteenth century, spurred by an unlikely and uneasy alliance between philological study and the kind of civilizing errand of literature one might associate with Matthew Arnold. For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual. Such views reached their climax in the era of the Second World War, with the cultural mobilization against fascism that made liberal values seem all the more worth cultivating in their fragility. The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.” More…

Picking the Wrong Witch

Published on January 29, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From Richard Byrne at The Common Review…

Once upon a time there was a magical empire of letters called Central Europe. Its borders were fuzzy but recognizable. Vienna was its capital. The receding Ottoman Empire provided more of its territory. It was a place that existed largely in cafés and castles, train stations and brothels. The empire’s writers found inspiration in the uneasy play of imperialism, capitalism, and burgeoning nationalism in its borders. Psychoanalysis and Marxism and Zionism overlapped and clashed and conspired, depending on whom you asked. Austria’s defeat in the First World War did not end that empire— far from it. The new states formed after Versailles solidified and expanded its reach. The sustained and vicious assault of Nazism could not eradicate it, either. Many of its leading lights survived even that horror, through Holocaust and exile, to find themselves at the front lines of the Cold War, their fame fanned by the exigencies of dissidence and samizdat.

Dubravka Ugreši?, daughter of a Croatian father and a Bulgarian mother, was born into that Central Europe in 1949. It was a literary empire built by the likes of Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Robert Musil, and Karl Kraus, and its expansion had writers from Yugoslavia—Miroslav Krleža, Ivo Andri?, and Meša Selimovi?—busy discovering new vistas.

But that Central Europe, which survived two wars, did not survive a third—the Cold War that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ironically, the greatest writers of the empire when it finally disappeared—Václav Havel and Danilo Kiš—were outsized figures in events that led to its vanishing. Central Europe’s end, though sad, was largely peaceful—the empire itself dissolving fizzily in the great political and economic scramble westward to the European Union and NATO. The difference that was dissidence was erased. Central Europe’s writers found themselves the wards of small nations competing in the larger European marketplace. But in the former Yugloslavia, Ugreši?’s neighborhood, the empire collapsed in a spasm of blood and fire. More…

The art of good writing

Published on January 22, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From Adam Haslett at the Financial Times…

In 1919, the young EB White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte’s Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition entitled “The Elements of Style”, a 43-page list of rules of usage, principles of style and commonly misused words. It was a brief for brevity. “Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk wrote. “When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.” Half a century later, when preparing his old professor’s manuscript for publication, White added an essay of his own underlining the argument for concision in moral terms. “Do not overwrite,” he instructed. “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” Strunk & White, as the combined work came to be known, was issued in 1959 and went on to become a defining American statement of what constituted good writing, with 10m copies sold, and counting. Its final rule summoned the whole: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.”

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. As Lorin Stein, the new editor of the celebrated literary magazine The Paris Review, recently put it to me: “It’s like a national superego.” And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring. More…

The Personal is not the Political

Published on January 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Seyla Benhabib at the Boston Review…

More than two decades after her death in 1975, Hannah Arendt has emerged as the political theorist of the post-totalitarian moment. Arendt authored the first major philosophical treatise to deal with totalitarianism as a political regime that forever changed our understanding of politics and human nature, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Throughout her work she emphasized the special importance of an autonomous public realm. She saw the public sphere, as distinct from the family and the economy, as the arena in which we are uniquely able to express our human capacity to jointly address common concerns. Totalitarianism has been its greatest enemy, but the distinctive values of public life have suffered also from the pressures of the capitalist economy and administrative bureaucracy, and from the invasive presence, in the media in particular, of intimate and sexual stories which are properly the concern of the private domain.

Born in 1906 in Hannover to an assimilated Jewish family, Arendt was forced to leave Germany in 1933, after being arrested for researching documentation on the exclusion of Jews from major professional organizations. Crossing the border to Czechoslovakia, and then to Paris, she proceeded to work with Jewish organizations helping to settle children in Palestine. In 1940 she came to the United States with her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, and both became American citizens. Her experiences, then, read like a parable of this century: persecution, statelessness, exile, a brief internment in a detention camp, immigration, success and public recognition. It should come as no surprise that in the new Germany she has become something of an icon. Streets and trains have been named after her; commemorative stamps have been issued. The junior partners of Germany’s current ruling coalition, the Greens, have even created a Hannah Arendt prize. More…

Recently published in the Humanities Journal

Published on January 19, 2011 in Journal. 1 Comment

humanities

The most recent issue of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of Consciousness through Death

Published on January 13, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Death, Our Last Illusion: A Scientific and Spiritual Probing of Consciousness through Death by Susan Shore is now available from The Humanities imprint.

Is there anything beyond death? And is it worth having?

This book begins with the latest science on the Near-death Experience, then explores the passage through physical death to the states of conscious being beyond. These states ~ often blissful ~ are outlined by our great religious traditions, and detailed in Tibetan Buddhism and the perennial philosophy, particularly in the Alice Bailey books. Traditional sources are compared with findings of science and medicine, and psychology from Jung and Piaget to Wilber. Later chapters examine clinical studies by reputable psychiatrists and psychologists: These were undertaken after they accidentally took subjects into ‘the place the Tibetans call the Bardo’ ~ the state after death /between lives.

In a letter to acclaimed Australian journalist Pamela Bone, author Susan Shore wrote:

You say in your book Bad Hair Days that the brain is the only thinking mechanism, therefore consciousness cannot survive death. In my book, I examine a mass of evidence…to the contrary…that is ignored. This is due to its rejection by a materialistic science that can be as inflexible (Dawkins is its apologist) as the religion it often deplores.

Death, Our Last Illusion examines the science of dying (in studies in the Lancet etc.), and discovers that hypoxia, drugs, religious training etc., have no explanatory power as causes of the Near-death Experience.’ (23 August 2007).

Pamela Bone, whose book Bad Hair Days was about the passage to her own death, found the book ‘wonderful…deeply thoughtful…beautifully written. It has made me think again’, she concluded.

Up from Zero Hour: Habermas, An Intellectual Biography

Published on January 11, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From The Book…

Jürgen Habermas ranks today as the single most important public intellectual in all of Continental Europe. But he is also a formidable philosopher whose major contributions to social and political theory, constitutional law, historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language (to name only the fields he revisits with greatest frequency) are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless. This twofold persona—technical philosopher and public controversialist—does not strike most Europeans as unfamiliar. Sartre was such a creature, too. But in the Anglophone world it is a species that remains exotic. John Rawls, to whom Habermas is often compared, is justly remembered as the major Anglophone political philosopher of the twentieth century, but beyond the university walls his public presence was minimal. You have to go back to the early twentieth century—maybe to Bertrand Russell—to find a philosopher who achieved a similar prestige for both his technical philosophical achievements and his interventions on the public stage.

What is perhaps most striking about the case of Habermas is the way he has managed to sustain a graceful balance between these roles. His major contributions to social and political theory display a depth of erudition and insight that is really stunning. But as a public intellectual he is a muscular critic who is unafraid of polemic. How has he simultaneously managed both roles? More…