A Time for the Humanities

A Time for the Humanities
Author: Tim Dean
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2009-08-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0823229211

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

A New History of the Humanities

A New History of the Humanities
Author: Rens Bod
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0199665214

Offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present.

The Humanities: Past, Present and Future

The Humanities: Past, Present and Future
Author: Michael F. Shaughnessy
Publisher: Nova Science Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Humanities
ISBN: 9781536119763

The humanities have been an integral part of humanitys cultural structure for centuries. In this book, a number of leading scholars reflect on the past, present and offer their perspectives for the future of the humanities. The first chapter (written by Jennifer Laubenthal, Jonathan Helmick and Kathleen Melago) describes the vitality of music for humanistic study. Next, Kevin Donnelly provides his perspectives and research of the humanities as they pertain to Australian history. Professor Donald Elder then extols the humanities from a historical perspective, investigating key crucial events that have taken place in America. Literacy and literacy instruction in the past, present and future are detailed by Professors Thompson and Coffey, while scholar Paul Horton examines the plight of the humanities in the vise of K-20 corporate education reform. Emerging technologies in humanities education is critically examined by Arjun Sabharwal while Gerald Cupchik explores the humanities, emotions and aesthetics in a singular fashion. The realms of pedagogy and knowledge are explored by Will Fitzhugh and Michael F. Shaughnessy, while Greg Eft paints a panorama of concerning the definition of beauty as it pertains to the humanities. Geni Flores then follows in a chapter that promotes and accentuates the importance of multiculturalism and diversity as instruments of social justice. Josh McVey interprets Scripture and its origins within the humanities while Anna Beck explores historical American theatre and provides a glimpse of this realm through various windows. Opal Greer sheds light on what we may be able to discern from the humanities past and envisions the realm of their future in universities and academia. Professor Elder contributes a second time to this manuscript, boldly going where not historian has gone before and examining the relevance of space history to this subject matter. Bringing the book to a close, Herbert London offers his perspective on the future of the humanities. Scholars, researchers, critics, historians, art lovers, and musicians as well as many involved in education will relish and enjoy this rich, robust exploration of the humanities and its relation to the past, present and future.

The Betrayal of the Humanities

The Betrayal of the Humanities
Author: Bernard M. Levinson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 025306080X

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history. The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism. The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

The Future Without a Past

The Future Without a Past
Author: John Paul Russo
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2005
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826264735

"Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo"--Provided by publisher.

How to Do Things with Fictions

How to Do Things with Fictions
Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012-08-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019518856X

Why does Mark's Jesus speak in parables? Why does Plato's Socrates make bad arguments? Why are Beckett's novels so inscrutable? And why don't stage magicians even pretend to summon spirits anymore? In a series of captivating chapters on Mark, Plato, Beckett, Mallarm , and Chaucer, Joshua Landy not only answers these questions but explains why they are worth asking in the first place. Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith. Delivering plenty of surprises along the way--that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that metaphor is powerfully connected to religious faith; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions--How to Do Things with Fictions convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.

Bonfire of the Humanities

Bonfire of the Humanities
Author: Bruce S. Thornton
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497651603

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleaguered, discipline—classics—and reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselves—their careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other things—as the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to “academic populism,” an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.

Timescales

Timescales
Author: Bethany Wiggin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2020-01-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1452963681

Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmanşah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U.