The Humanities and Public Life

By Hilary Jewett

This volume tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training, and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many of us in the humanities by the "Torture Memos" released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by our government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry, we want to claim, could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: this is not possible. Teaching the humanities, appears to many a disempowered profession--and status--within American culture. Yet the ability to read critically the messages that society, politics, and culture bombard us with may be more than ever needed training in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about. This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars and intellectuals in debate on the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange may suggest that Shelley was not wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: cultural change carries everything in its wake. The attentive interpretive reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields, and to take its place in the public sphere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823257041

Reviews for The Humanities and Public Life

[mcdenis-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a meaningful and timely discussion of the role of the Humanities in public life based on a symposium condensed into book form. The essays are clear and concise and the respondents represent various layers of academia contributing their insights on the merit of the Humanities, its ethical quality for professional life and the apparent neglect or planned demise in universities in favor of economically or metrically determined course material. This is a fruitful little book providing much needed insight in the midst of our current chaos in the public sector over values or lack thereof.

[jpporter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Peter Brooks has put together an impressive collection of essays that examine the relevance of, and the important role played by, humanities in the social/public arena. While many of the readings can be a bit dry, all of them are dense - full of important observations, studies, and theories designed to address an area of study that is often dismissed as scarcely pertinent to today's world. In an environment where the educational expenditures in the humanities tends to be minimized, this is an important reminder that the oldest areas of human endeavor are fundamentally important in a world where the human being is itself being marginalized.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Humanities and Public Life is a minefield for a reviewer. The “ethics of reading”, the basis of the discussion, examines how we choose, collect, interpret, react, evaluate and are changed by texts. The cobweb of possibilities, and the intensity of the light shined on it, are intimidating. Not to mention the quality of the participants. This book is the print version of a symposium put together by Peter Brooks of Princeton, after being, shall we say “moved” by the Torture Memos of the Bush administration. He invited his peers from Ivy League-type schools to be the audience and the participants. Everyone got to comment on everyone else’s contributions. The result is thorough, thoughtful, debatable, and unresolved. All good things.At base it’s a pretty defensive argument for the humanities – how to justify their continuing existence in a time of cutbacks, how to make them more pertinent, more effective, more mission critical, more relevant. It diverges to all kinds of tangents as the learned participants snap off weak limbs and run with them.The whole debate is put into strikingly sharp relief by William Germano, who came to academia (Cooper Union) via publishing (Columbia, Routledge). Unlike many of his co-commenters who deal with some aspect of someone else’s contribution, Germano takes on the entire topic - head on. His analysis is clear and pointed. His conclusion is that we might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps it is writing, not reading that needs to be ethically self conscious, because the writer will change the reader, for better or for worse, correctly or incorrectly. He puts the entire argument into clear perspective by taking it to a different level. The best defense of the humanities comes from Jonathan Lear (Chicago), who, trying out for reporter at the Yale Daily News, interviewed the head of the fraternity where rumor had it they were physically branding initiates. The fraternity head said “It’s not as bad as you think.” And it turns out, that has been his m.o. ever since. Oh, his name was George W. Bush, the same Bush behind the Torture Memos that led to the symposium. Lear asks how the world might have been different had Bush been taught some right from wrong, had some dean become indignant over this activity, had the humanities taken a more direct role in forming students’ ability to judge ethically.The result is nothing - no final statement, no recommendations, no follow-on symposia. But we are left with a book that challenges on numerous levels and from numerous angles.