Hi All,
This post is devoted to the event GAC plans to host this spring, the proposed topic of which is “the future of the humanities.” The aim of this event is to bring together graduate students and faculty to discuss a topic of interest and importance to us all.
This is also a great chance for GAC to invite a speaker or to arrange a panel that will appeal to us as a group, despite our various period, critical, and/or methodological affiliations.
With that in mind, we would appreciate suggestions and comments related but not limited to the following:
–Whom should we invite? (Please feel free to propose anyone, from our faculty or from outside of the University.)
–What specific questions do you think we should pursue?
–What type of format most appeals to you?
Thank you!
Kelly and Emily
Here are two more suggestions for Princeton-based speakers: Jill S. Dolan, professor of English and theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and director of gender and sexuality studies at Princeton University, and Stacy E. Wolf, associate professor of theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and director of Princeton Atelier.
Another suggestion for a guest speaker: Mary Bly of Fordham.
http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/faculty/english_faculty/mary_bly_28515.asp
The real crux of this question for me is “What is the role of the humanities in late capitalism?”, and secondly, “What is the role of the humanities professor (in the same)?”
There seem to me two main approaches that might be productive, rather than merely reprising the hand-wringing, empty exhortation, or capitluations to market ideology that seem to make up so much of the discourse on this question.
The first would be to address the contentious question of values, humanism, and the ethos of “professing.” What does it mean to “profess” the humanities? Can we even make an argument for long-term valuation of canons, texts, and discussions about them? Or do we see the role of the professor, insofar as it escapes its merely socioeconomic function as a worker in the education industry, as that of cultural critic, in a vaguely post-structuralist way? Or are we even less than that: nothing more than priestly decoration, a plutocracy’s spiritual ornament? The humanities clearly have little value in the current marketplace, and that value is diminishing. Is there a market-indedendent ethos which sustains the humanities? And if so, what is it?
The other approach of interest to me would be facing squarely the question of academia as an industry, and asking how we might think about fighting the seemingly overwhelming trends toward casualization, instrumentalization, increasingly gross disparities in wealth and resource allocation between celebrity academics at high-profile schools and the seething masses of toiling knowledge-workers at degree-factories, the increasing costs of journals, the elimination of tenure-track positions and increasing graduate-school enrollments all across the country, etc. The problems we face as workers are nearly innumerable. Simon Head’s recent article in the NYRB about the British academic system offers (yet another) chilling view of what we can look forward to.
Can anything be done? Are instutions such as the MLA or labor unions effective means of organizing political power? Do peer-reviewed online journals offer a way to sustain intellectual discussion against the combination of rising journal fees and diminishing library budgets? Etc., etc.
Outside our faculty, I’d be very excited to see Andrew Delbanco (Columbia), Simon Head (Oxford, currently visiting @ NYU & the Institute for Public Knowledge), Mark Bauerlein (Emory), Marc Bousquet (Santa Clara University), Michael Berube (Penn State), or James Miller (New School) talk about these topics.
As for people at Princeton (or visiting next semester), I’d definitely like to hear from John Guillory, Susan Wolfson, Eduardo Cadava, Diana Fuss, visiting fellow Russ Leo, Mario Vargas Llosa (wouldn’t that be exciting!), Peter Brooks, and Tony Grafton.
And panels sound great.
Testing…