Monthly Archive for August, 2011

Announcing–10th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, Montréal

Published on August 30, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

The Tenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities will be held at the Centre Mont-Royal in Montréal, Canada from 14 to 17 June 2012.

Thank you to all of those who contributed to the 2011 Humanities Conference, held at the Universidad de Granada in Granada, Spain. The conference brought together delegates from many backgrounds and discipline areas, continuing the conference’s commitment to inclusive dialogue.

Please join our online conversation for conference updates and more by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter at http://thehumanities.com.

The Larkin puzzle

Published on August 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Martin Amis at the Financial Times…

In the mid-1970s I edited the Weekend Competition in the literary pages of the New Statesman (with the judicious assistance of Julian Barnes). One week we threw down the following challenge: contestants were asked to reimagine Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in the style of any modern poet. It was a corpulent postbag: many Gunns, Hugheses, Hills, Porters, Lowells, Bishops, Plaths; and many, many Larkins. First place went to our most trusted star – a reclusive gentleman named Martin Fagg. At the Comp we gave out small cash prizes (Fagg got the maximal fiver), but no prizes are now on offer for guessing which poet he had in mind. More…

Call for Journal Editor

Published on August 30, 2011 in Headline, Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The International Journal of the Humanities seeks an editor, or team of editors, for a one-year term. This is an opportunity to make a significant contribution to what we believe is one of the leading journals in its field, the journal’s associated conference and, more broadly, the knowledge-community which the journal and conference seek to serve.

The roles of the editor are to:

  • write an introduction for the Journal volume which would be included in the first issue for the year, and possibly on the website, the newsletter and other appropriate places or for the purposes of marketing and promotion.
  • collate papers addressing a theme of the editor’s choosing into a book, to be launched at the conference at the completion of the editor’s term. The chapters may be drawn from submissions to the journal during this or recent years, and other material as considered appropriate.
  • actively solicit manuscripts for the Journal from well-known and notable members of the community—these would could be refereed if the author wished, or regarded as ‘invited papers’.
  • assist the Commissioning Editor with suggestions of supplementary peer reviewers for specific papers (and this will never be burdensome – note that the Commissioning Editor of the Journal finalizes a majority of the peer reviewer requirements based on thematic matching and ‘mutual obligation’ principles in which all author requested to review up to three other papers).
  • promote the journal throughout their network and other associated networks.
  • maintain regular communications with the community via periodical blog posts to the community website (which feeds automatically to our email newsletter, Facebook and Twitter).

The editor will be offered a complimentary electronic subscription to the Journal, free copies of the book which they edit, an electronic subscription to the book series as well as complimentary registrations to attend the conferences at the beginning and end of their term.

Qualifications

The Editor of the Journal must possess the following attributes:

  • They will have successfully obtained higher degree, and have academic teaching and scholarly research experience in an area related to the subject matter of the Journal.
  • They will have published in this or other comparable scholarly journals.

Applicants are asked to send:

  1. a cover letter outlining their interest and relevant experience, and the ways in which you would propose to enhance the profile of the journal
  2. a curriculum vitae
  3. a special theme outline: a title with paragraph explanation.

Please send applications and supporting documentation to journals@thehumanities.com.

The deadline for applications is 26 September 2011.

The Schools We Need

Published on August 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Erik Reece at Orion Magazine…

It’s a cold December evening in Lexington, Kentucky, and I’m sitting by the fire with a teetering stack of final essays from ENG 104: Freshman Comp. I know what I’m in for. All semester I’ve been hectoring my fifty-odd students to insert commas after introductory phrases, to improve paragraph development, and to remember that the phrase for granted (as in “take for granted”) means “to accept,” whereas for granite, the phrase they often use instead, could only suggest homage to that igneous rock, something akin to W. H. Auden’s poem “In Praise of Limestone.”

It’s been a tough three months. I had been away from full-time teaching for a few years, and away from eighteen-year-olds for longer. From 1995 to 2005, I taught four, sometimes five, sections of Freshman Comp each semester. I read roughly 8,000 essays during that decade—200,000 pages, 50,000,000 words. After all that, I took a little time off to do some writing of my own. But when my book was finished, the department chair ordered me back to the front line. More…

Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 now available

Published on August 29, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

humanities_frontThe first issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 9, Number 1 contains:

Continue reading ‘Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 now available’

Governing The Future

Published on August 29, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Governing the Future by Derek Wallace is now available from The Humanities series.

Since the Second World War, state administrations of all stripes have sought social stability by privileging the economic – first, through central planning, grounded in confidence in the achievability of human mastery over space and change; then through neo-liberalism, driven by an a-temporal faith in the collective benefits of maximizing individual choice. Both emphases have been equally hubristic, and devastating for the planet. This book inquires into the influencing factors as well as the practical realizations of this project at the level of national state organization and decision-making, with particular reference to Western liberal democracies, using New Zealand as a case study. In its latter stages, the book moves towards an exploration of the prospects and opportunities for a more balanced and realistic approach to managing the future – one that takes into account the demands of sustainable well-being for all. The experience of the last thirty years – characterized by a retreat from central planning followed by a partial return – and the fuller understanding of the limits of government action made possible by that experience make it an appropriate moment for a study of this kind.

Derek Wallace is a senior lecturer in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches academic and professional writing, and interpersonal communication. His scholarly training was in the Department of English at the same university, where he did a doctorate entitled “Managing Power: The role of writing in the formation of public policy”, describing and analyzing the texts surrounding an instance of policy development. A comprehensive account of this work appears in  “Writing and the management of power: Producing public policy in New Zealand.” In Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell (eds.), Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives. Perspectives on writing, 159–178. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Rebel Rebel–Arthur Rimbaud’s breif career

Published on August 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Daniel Mendelsohn at The New Yorker…

On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud. More…

Death Is Not the End–Long Live Theory!

Published on August 19, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From n+1 magazine…

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism,” then simply “analytic philosophy,” was the best thing going. The original idea was that logical analysis of language would show which philosophical problems might be solved, and which eradicated because they were not phraseable in clear, logical language. That meant wiping out most of what Hegel had left us, and Europe still understood, as philosophy—including history, being, death, recognition, love. Still brand new in the 1930s (Carnap, Russell, Ayer) when trying to develop its ideal logical language, it had only just become institutional in the analytic pragmatism of the 1950s and 1960s (Quine), in time to be cranked up again in the 1970 (Kripke), saved from termination by the reintroduction of naive assumptions rejected at the start. More…

For Every Life Saved

Published on August 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jeff Sharlet at Killing the Buddha…

* The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die. *

For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband, make herself a cup of coffee, and sit down in her study, still wearing her nightgown. The study was even smaller than her kitchen—barely large enough for the table she had bought from a doctor’s office for ten dollars. On it she kept her notebooks. Sipping coffee, she’d start with the one on top, and by the light of a table lamp, beneath a portrait of the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, she’d review yesterday’s stories. Re-reading drew her back like a current, not into her pages but into the world to which she wanted to return. When she felt that world thickening around her, she’d skip ahead to where she’d left off the night before, pick up a pencil, and begin to write, slipping from her apartment in Montreal back to the last days of the Lodz ghetto.

First to greet her there was always her favorite creation, Samuel Zuckerman. Born of Chava’s memories of the rich men of Lodz, Samuel was a “salon Zionist” and heir to a fortune, a Polish patriot who dreamed of Israel for other, poorer people; he couldn’t bear to think of leaving of Lodz, the Manchester of Poland. His passion was writing—a history of the Jews of Lodz, 250,000 of them, living in a city then known as the Manchester of Poland for its forest of smokestacks. More…

Humanism

Published on August 17, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Richard Sennett at The Hedgehog Review via the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture…

In this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to consider the relation of displacement and humanism—a cultural ideal on the one hand, a social fact on the other. The two seem to have nothing in common. Yet I want to argue that they do; at the dawn of the modern era, a person’s capacity to manage and master displacement formed part of the humanist project, and, I argue, it continues to do so today, but on very different terms. In a world filled with mobile people—economic immigrants and political exiles in particular—an old humanist ideal might help them to give shape to their lives.

Baruch Spinoza was the humanist philosopher whom we immediately think of as experiencing this connection firsthand. He was exiled from Amsterdam because he was accused of heresy, of violating Judaism. From the thirteenth century on, many Christians also began to be persecuted for the same supposed crime, that is, heresy. One of the greatest of Spinoza’s Christian brothers was the Humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who lived from 1463 to 1494, the younger son of a minor aristocratic family driven first from Italy to France for heresy, then imprisoned in France for that crime, who then returned to Florence to die, thanks to the protection of Lorenzo de Medici. More…