The Humanities and Public Life
by Edited by Peter Brooks, with Hilary Jewett
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Pub Date Nov 04 2013 | Archive Date Jun 17 2014
Description
This book 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 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 the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible.
Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever 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 to debate the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange suggests 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.
Advance Praise
“In The Humanities and Public Life Peter Brooks
has convened a remarkable conversation that explores the crucial contribution
of the humanities to the growth of a transnational, interdisciplinary public
sphere. Debating the ‘ethics of reading’ from a range of perspectives, his
contributors provide a vivid account of the role of language and action in
defining new ways of configuring the relation between politics and
personhood.”—Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities,
Harvard University
“More than just a collection of smart essays, The Humanities and Public Life leaves
ample room for discussion, dialogue, and dissent among its
distinguished participants. This volume crackles with intellectual
energy. Strongly recommended for anyone concerned with the ethics of
reading and the public good of the humanities.”—Rita Felski, University of Virginia
“This is a highly original and deeply
exhilarating contribution to public debate about the value of the humanities.
The scholars convened by Brooks are individually first-rate and diverse in field,
representing literary studies, philosophy, politiical theory, law, and
humanistic social science. Their insightful brief essays (it does not denigrate
the others if I single out Elaine Scarry's beautiful meditation on the
imagination and Jonathan Lear's haunting evocation of cultural loss) are framed
by vigorous discussion and genuine interdisciplinary exchange. Stimulating for
scholars and non-scholars alike, this book is unique for the range and quality
of perspectives it makes available.”—Martha C. Nussbaum, University of
Chicago
“The Humanities and Public Life, an
original, provocative, multi-voiced commentary on the state and possibilities
of the humanities, strikes fresh notes in what has become a rather tired
(though often desperately earnest) conversation. Although its essays repeatedly
take unexpected directions, it suggests a unified way of thinking about issues
that might appear disparate.”—Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon,
Professor Emerita, University of Virginia
“Like Ruth, homesick among the alien corn,
humanities scholarship seems lost in the cold wilderness of instrumental
reason. The Humanities and Public Life is a tonic and refreshing conversation
about the possibility of redemption.”—Robert Post, Yale Law School
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780823257058 |
| PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
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