Common Knowledge

Epstein, Mikhail;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692079

This essay's central concern is the need for a new, practical dimension in the humanities, emphasizing their constructive rather than purely scholarly aspects. An analysis is offered of various types of inventions in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, art, and literature, such as new disciplines, genres, cultural practices, and intellectual movements. An invention is not the production of a given work, however great, but rather a principle or technique that can be applied to the production of many works by others. Following Francis Bacon's call for the invention of new arts and sciences, the essay outlines new disciplines: technohumanities , which would study humans as a part of the technosphere; pathohumanities , which would investigate the self-destructive mechanisms of civilization; and scriptorics , which would focus on Homo scriptor , who has survived “the death of the author.” A research and educational program, uniting major fields of the humanities, is proposed: PILLAR (the acronym of philosophy, information, language, literature, art, religion ) would be a transdisciplinary strategy complementary to STEM, integrating scholarship and inventorship. humanistic invention transformative humanities futurology “death of the author” manifestos

Petel, Adir H.;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692110

Mikhail Epstein's essay “Inventive Thinking in the Humanities,” also published in the January 2017 issue of Common Knowledge , argues that the humanities are in crisis because humanist academics have “turned away from human beings and focused on texts.” Expanding on this point while concentrating on a single humanities field, literary studies, this response to Epstein makes the case that fear and awe of the sciences have resulted in the exclusion of subjectivity from literary criticism, even though regarding the critic as anything but a subjective human being responding to the creative work of other subjective human beings makes very limited sense. Avenues of resistance to impersonal criticism have emerged from time to time, and this essay explores several, including those of Susan Sontag, Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, Rivka Eifermann, Harold Bloom, and Stephen Greenblatt. None, however, is seen as having had a decisive impact on the academic mainstream. This essay concludes by examining the possibility that literary works are best responded to not in criticism but in other literary works. subjectivity countertransference personal criticism reader-response criticism twenty-first-century fiction

Bynum, Caroline Walker;Doyno, Mary Harvey;von Mücke, Dorothea;Paxton, Frederick S.;Naddaff, Ramona;Wallerstein, Katharine;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692122

The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who solicited and organized this set of five case studies, explains in her introduction to them that their intent is to bypass the currently popular and unsupported claim that the humanities have practical relevance and, instead, to offer ruminative descriptions of what happens when teachers and students meet to discuss texts and objects. She explains that the essays report in detail on five individual classes in five very different academic settings, in the hope of helping to turn the international anglophone conversation about humanistic education away from utilitarian, presentist, all-inclusive claims and toward a demonstration of what the humanities do in practice. humanities education defenses of the humanities pedagogy

Doyno, Mary Harvey;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692136

As part of a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay asks how one can teach college students with little or no exposure to close reading, critical analysis, or the premodern world to read a text written c. 202 CE. An instructor at Sacramento State University in California describes her experience introducing students enrolled in a humanities survey course to The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas —a text that combines the prison diaries of two North African Christians with an eyewitness account of their deaths. In this description of a single, seventy-five-minute class session, the reader is shown how students can be prompted to find the beginnings of a complex interpretation in their own initial, “gut” reactions to an alien and difficult text. humanities teaching close reading Perpetua

Bynum, Caroline Walker;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692155

As part of a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution reports in detail on the initial class taught by the author in the spring of 2015, during her time at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in art history. By presenting students with three sets of devotional materials—two papier-mâché medallions painted by nuns at the convent of Wienhausen in northern Germany on the eve of the Reformation; a n'kisi n'kondi figure from the Yombe group of Kongo peoples in the nineteenth-century; and a description, taken from Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead , of a child baptizing kittens with creek water—the instructor raises questions about how materials convey holiness and influence viewers or worshippers. She prods history and literature students, both graduate and undergraduate, to take physical objects seriously as evidence, and she challenges those in art history to study objects and also texts normally regarded as outside of their purview. objects humanities teaching n'kisi n'kondi Marilynne Robinson medieval nuns

von Mücke, Dorothea;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692200

This contribution to a set of case studies, titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” focuses on one session of a Columbia University seminar, Aesthetics and Philosophy. The class, comprising a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate students from diverse programs and backgrounds, was assigned Johann Gottfried Herder's difficult 1771 “Treatise on the Origin of Language” for discussion. “Herder's Sheep” details how the active participation of students was ensured, what techniques of communication were used to ensure it, and what the students learned during the discussion. Johann Gottfried Herder humanities teaching aesthetics human language

Paxton, Frederick S.;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692212

A contribution to a set of case studies, titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay describes a course on the deep history of Italy developed for a “semester abroad” program in Perugia during the spring of 2016. It describes, in particular, two class meetings in the middle of the term that focused on the use of DNA, archaeology, and anthropology to study the lives of seven women who are the ancestors of almost every European today, as “imagined” by the geneticist Bryan Sykes in his book The Seven Daughters of Eve . These women lived between forty-five hundred and ten thousand years ago—from the period when glaciers expanded to cover much of the northern hemisphere until the “Neolithic revolution,” when, in the wake of the glaciers' retreat, people turned permanently to farming. The student-led discussions, reconstructed here, of the lives of these women show the value of addressing questions of deep history in an international setting, where the intersections and disjunctions of the global and the local are especially evident. deep history Bryan Sykes Perugia Paleolithic Neolithic

Naddaff, Ramona;Wallerstein, Katharine;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692224

Written for a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution describes an undergraduate course on ancient rhetoric at Berkeley, in which Professor Ramona Naddaff was accused by a male student of demeaning women during a lecture and of causing him trauma in the process. He threatened to bring charges against her to campus authorities, claiming the support of fellow students. In her lecture, she had discussed the classical figuration of rhetoric—persuasive speech—as violence and sometimes rape. In a discussion the following week, some students requested the use of “trigger warnings” before the utterance of words like rape . The instructor and her teaching assistant Katharine Wallerstein individually give their views of this disconcerting experience and comment on the difficulties of teaching critical thinking in the current political and cultural climate. They conclude that the language of personal rights and the demand for self-protection tend to come at the expense of teaching and learning alike. Greek rhetoric rape “trigger warnings” humanities teaching

Bynum, Caroline Walker;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692258

The historian Caroline Walker Bynum, who solicited and organized this set of five case studies, explains in her afterword that one intention behind the series is to stimulate other teachers, as well as students, of the humanities to write similar ethnographies of the classroom and submit them to Common Knowledge .

Allen, Barry;

2017 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3692492