Overview
In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today’s humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests. The humanities portray a “dream of America” in two senses: they represent an aspiration of Americans since the first days of the Republic for a state so secure and prosperous that people could enjoy and appreciate culture for its own sake; and they embody in academic terms an idealized conception of the American national character. Although they are struggling to retain their status in America, the concept of the humanities has spread to other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and valuable contributions to higher education.
The Humanities and the Dream of America explores a number of linked problems that have emerged in recent years: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by philology in the formation of the humanities; the reasons for the humanities’ perpetual state of “crisis”; the shaping role of philanthropy in the humanities; and the new possibilities for literary study offered by the subject of pleasure. Framed by essays that draw on Harpham’s pedagogical experiences abroad and as a lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as his vantage as director of the National Humanities Center, this book provides an essential perspective on the history, ideology, and future of this important topic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226317014 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 344 KB |
About the Author
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Character of Criticism.
Read an Excerpt
The Humanities and the Dream of America
By GEOFFREY GALT HARPHAM
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31699-4
Chapter One
Beneath and Beyond the "Crisis in the Humanities"
I
One of the many curious facts about academic life in America is that very few people who work in the humanities ever think about them. Unlike academic departments, the category of the humanities seems even to humanists themselves a mere administrative convenience, a kind of phantom entity rather than a real principle of identity; and like all things administrative, it is resisted with indifference. The humanities are something like "North America," a level of organization with neither the urgency of the local nor the grand significance of the global.
But to many outside the university, it is the departmental structure that seems arbitrary and even artificial, while the larger classifications—humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and natural sciences—really describe something. From this point of view, the distinctions between the fields of the humanities are less important than the features they hold in common. Scholars working in the humanities would be well advised to sensitize themselves to this point of view; for if, in addition to thinking of themselves as specialists in a given discipline, they could also think of themselves as humanists, they could see how their work contributed to a larger project, how its distinctive emphasis fit together with others both humanistic and nonhumanistic. They would then be in a better position to understand their actual and potential contributions to knowledge as a whole and even to the culture at large. They would, in other words, be better able to address one of the most stubborn dilemmas in higher education, the perennial crisis in the humanities.
Virtually every survey of American higher education over the past half century has noted this crisis. Almost since the time of the Hindenburg, it seems, scholars have been crying, "Oh, the humanities!" Sometimes the crisis—whose dimensions can be measured in terms of enrollments, majors, courses offered, and salaries—is described as a separate and largely self-inflicted catastrophe confined to a few disciplines; sometimes it is linked to a general disarray in liberal education, and sometimes to the moral collapse and intellectual impoverishment of the entire culture. But one point emerges with considerable regularity and emphasis: humanistic scholars, conflicted and confused about their mission, suffer from an inability to convey to those on the outside and even to some on the inside the specific value they offer to public culture; they suffer, that is, from what the scholar and critic Louis Menand calls a "crisis of rationale."
Curiously, and disturbingly, Menand, a prominent humanist himself, sees no easy way out of this crisis and makes no attempt to formulate what he describes as the missing rationale for humanistic study. He is especially vexed by the "predictable and aimless eclecticism" fostered by a contemporary mood of "post-disciplinarity," in which tenured scholars feel licensed to abandon their training in order to pursue such topics as (in Menand's hypothetical example) "the history of carrots, written in the first person." If the professors abandon their disciplines, Menand notes, students facing an uncertain economic future might well wonder why they should devote themselves to reading literature, history, or philosophy.
Talk of crisis has been around for so long, however, that it has become simply incorporated into the most accustomed ways in which humanistic scholars understand themselves and their work. Once considered an affliction, crisis has become a way of life. What would the humanities be without their crisis? So inured have scholars in the humanities become to talk of crisis that many have almost been content to have a crisis rather than a rationale; in fact, it sometimes seems that the crisis is the rationale in that some scholars seem less interested in exposing students to the wisdom of the ages, the magic of art, and the rigors of history than they are in being observed in a dramatic, and sometimes entertaining, state of self-doubt.
A clearly articulated rationale for humanistic inquiry would, however, help displace the attention from the professor to the profession, and also to focus the profession's attention on the community whose support it seeks and whose long-term interests it aspires to serve. On the other hand, an inability or unwillingness on the part of humanists to give some account of their work that makes apparent its distinctiveness and value to the larger culture actually damages the disciplines themselves and makes it more likely that the humanities, currently hanging on to "North American" status, might actually start to look more like South or Central America.
II
If traditional rationales for humanistic study were to be condensed into a single sentence, that sentence might be the following: The scholarly study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves. This banal formulation may seem to have limited interest for us, but if we probe it a bit we can discover, preserved in the amber of tradition, elements that retain a certain enduring and even unexplored vitality. Examined closely, the sentence contains three distinct premises, that the humanities have the text as their object, human beings as their subject, and self-understanding as their purpose.
1. Textuality. As a valuable 1981 study, The Humanities in American Life, authored by the Commission on the Humanities says, "the humanities employ a particular medium ... the medium is language," specifically textual language. I believe that the word employ refers directly to humanistic scholarship, and somewhat less directly to the materials being studied, which can be texts either in the narrow, literal sense or in the more expansive sense that emerged about forty years ago, in which any material artifact—a cityscape, a carved bone, an earthwork, even a spoken word—could be considered a text. The key fact is pastness: as the authors say, the "turn of mind" distinctive of the humanities is "toward history." Once again, this formulation pertains to both the practice and the object of humanistic scholarship: humanists study documents produced in the past, and produce, in turn, other documents destined to become part of the historical record.
This textual-historical orientation sometimes gives to the humanities a backward-looking cast, especially by comparison with an image-and-technology-dominated mass culture. In such a context, the text- dependency of the humanities has sometimes seemed an archaic holdover, like a vestigial tailbone in primates that serves no present purpose. Feeling vulnerable on this point, humanists have responded either with an uncritical embrace of technology or with a stubborn defense of traditional textuality, neither of which has served them especially well.
The concept of the text is not neutral or natural, and is therefore not immune to criticism. As Richard Lanham pointed out in the dawning days of the Web in 1993, the printed text bears within itself a certain ideology, encouraging what he regarded as dangerous illusions about the possibility of objectivity and the separability of mind and voice. By comparison, he argued, technology restores to discourse the enlivening qualities of consciousness, mobility, play, and personality. An accomplished rhetorician, Lanham was unashamedly excited by the prospect of navigating sprawling networks of information unfurling before him, experiencing the heady sensation that he was becoming more spontaneous, improvisational, and even creative than seems possible while merely staring at a book. The comparison Lanham and others drew could hardly have been more extreme: on the one side, the dead text, wedged in among countless others in the catacombs of the library, requiring a sterile discipline of linear tracking by a solitary reader; and on the other, the live electronic network, with virtual arcades of possibilities created moment by moment by our own choices, our own desires, our own improvisatory expertise—the medium itself seeming to hold out a promise of infinite, immediate, transparent, and universal communication. Comparing the traditional form of the printed text with the vital and adaptive information networks available on the Web, Lanham warned that if humanists could not find a way to accommodate themselves to the new age, they might not survive its advent; or as he put it, "the 'humanist' task may pass to other groups while the humanities dwindle into grumpy antiquarianism."
But the book is not precisely the text. Digital technology erases some features of the book, but textuality as such has survived the technological revolution intact. Indeed, one might even argue that electronic technology does not replace the text but actually extends, supplements, and radicalizes other features of textuality by increasing our power to switch between texts of various kinds, and to take in writing, image, and sound at once. This retention and extension of the text are very good things, because textuality carries with it a number of invaluable entailments unrecognized by Lanham and others who celebrated the technological revolution as a fundamental alteration in the concept of information itself.
First, the material stability of the text, in both traditional and digital environments, implies a reassuring possibility of definite knowledge; and since the text represents intentions and agency, this implication extends to things not directly present to our senses. Reading a text, we are encouraged to seek the truth by observation, inference, and speculation, and are fortified in thinking that our search can produce results. Moreover, the very inertness of the text, its material indifference to our needs, helps produce that peculiar kind of intellectual pleasure distinctive of reading, a kind of weightlessness or freedom from immediate concerns; and we realize this benefit even in an electronic environment where we are not limited to the form of the book. This pleasure is accompanied, especially for the scholar, by a distinct sense of power. Since the truth of the past exists largely in textual traces, it must be assembled in the present, and can always be reassembled from a different point of view, with different emphases, presumptions, and priorities. In return for their focused attention on the object, readers—especially scholarly readers—are granted a license for a highly pleasurable act of synthetic speculative understanding that goes well beyond what is immediately or indisputably given.
Since it is, in theory, equally accessible to all readers, the text is also a public medium, creating around itself an invisible community of those who have or may yet read it. All texts are written from within some cultural tradition, and most groups or individuals look to the archive of the past for keys to their heritage and thus to their identity. But even though the access to a given text is determined by a host of local and contingent factors, the community implied by textuality itself is inclusive rather than exclusive because it is predicated on a particular kind of action rather than on identity. Indeed, one enters this community only after implicitly agreeing to submit to a task of reading that is in some ways depersonalizing, in that it involves a provisional suspension of identity and even, in certain cases, puts that identity at risk by subjecting it to new information, new stimuli, new questions, new stresses. The world pours forth from texts in response to disciplined interest.
And so, although reading may awaken or refine elements of our individual character, and although the information we get from texts may be highly particular, the fact that reading is a labor that all can, in theory, undertake means that the heritage we glean from texts is a human as well as a local possession: textuality as such is organized around the principle of universal communication across time and space, and constitutes a continuous and theoretically unbounded archive. That quintessentially American figure, Thoreau, had absorbed a vast range of knowledge from traditions other than his own, including classical philosophy and history; his "On Civil Disobedience" was read eagerly by that definitively Indian figure Gandhi, who learned from him (and from Emerson, Ruskin, and Tolstoy, as well as from Indian philosophy) the principles of nonviolent protest; this philosophy was then absorbed by a theology student in Chester, Pennsylvania, named Martin Luther King, who gave it memorable expression in the course of that characteristically American protest movement, the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, struggles that were directly inspirational to Nelson Mandela and others fighting apartheid in South Africa.
No responsible scholar believes that humanistic study directly fosters private virtue and responsible citizenship. On the other hand, most scholars do believe that by engaging in humanistic study, they are doing something worthwhile in a larger sense; they are simply uncertain about how to connect this larger public good with their private scholarly activity. In a penetrating assessment, "Humanities and the Library in the Digital Age," Carla Hesse makes a fresh attempt, arguing that traditional textuality provides a "space of reflexivity" that takes concrete form in libraries, "our most cherished spaces of contemplation and reflection upon human values." Especially by comparison with the ecstasies that greeted the first days of the Internet, the state of mind associated with reading a book is stubbornly antiutopian, in part because of the measured pace of reading. This pace, which can seem to be out of step with a world devoted to the principle of acceleration, is, Hesse argues, deeply rooted in the history of our democratic ideals. As a "slow form of exchange," she says, the book implicitly "conceives of public communication not as action but rather as reflection upon action" (115). A "logic of deferral" structures books, and this deferral opens a space for a "deep investigation, concentration, reflection, and contemplation" (116). Hesse links the capacity for self-reflection with self-representation and self-constitution, and therefore with self-governance. She concludes this majestic argument with the assertion that the humanities, rooted in a principle of reflective delay that is rendered almost visible in the book, reinforce and promote, even if they cannot guarantee or secure, the development of "accountable citizens of a democracy" (117).
That we have access to the past only through texts suggests that the past is not a constant, pressing burden, but a subject that engages our attention on a voluntary basis. We can, if we choose, close the book, or log off. And so, even without claiming that the humanities have a direct positive impact on private character or public citizenship, we may say that the textual emphasis of the humanities implies, as it were, the possibility of truthful knowledge (and the symmetrical, equally bracing, possibility of error), the act of reflection, and the cultivation of democratic citizenship, and fosters as well a sense of freedom and power opening onto an undiscovered future.
2. Humanity. According, once again, to The Humanities in American Life, "The essence of the humanities is a spirit or an attitude toward humanity.... [The humanities] show how the individual is autonomous and at the same time bound, in the ligatures of language and history, to humankind across time and throughout the world" (3). Reading more than a generation after these fine phrases were written, it is easy to detect in them a certain worldview, emphasizing both individual autonomy and universal harmony, that may reflect "American life" at the dawn of the Reagan era more accurately than it does humanity as such. The formulation does, however, contain a germ of constant truth in its insistence that the humanities are inconceivable without some idea of the human.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Humanities and the Dream of America by GEOFFREY GALT HARPHAM Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Humanities as a Foreign Language
1 Beneath and beyond the “Crisis in the Humanities”
2 Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology
3 Between Humanity and the Homeland: The Evolution of an Institutional Concept
4 The Next Big Thing in Literary Study: Pleasure
5 Gold Mines in Parnassus: Thoughts on the Integration of Professional and Liberal Education
6 Melancholy in the Midst of Abundance: How America Invented the Humanities
7 The Depths of the Heights: Reading Conrad with America’s Military
Notes
Index