Times entertainment news from Hollywood including event coverage, celebrity gossip and deals. View photo galleries, read TV and movie reviews and more. In this essay, I argue for a reorientation of discourse about the humanities to the objects of humanistic study rather than claims for their value or effect. Returning to an essay Erwin Panofsky published in 1940, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” I build on Panofsky’s rich distinction between “monuments” and “documents” as the two sides of the humanistic object of study. By “monuments,” Panofsky refers to all of those human artifacts, actions, or ideas that have urgent meaning for us in the present. By “document,” he refers to all of those traces or records by means of which we recover monuments. Download filmul eu cand vreau sa fluier fluier torent. Monuments and documents bring the long time of human existence, past or future, into relation to the short time of human life, a relation that defines the objects of study in all the humanities and confirms the undeniable interest of that study. And for short time an endlesse moniment. Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion” If there is one feature that most recent discussions of the humanities have in common, it is surely the rhetorical form of the defense. The prevalence of defense suggests—not without evidence—that the humanities are under attack and have been perhaps since their inception. Perennially declared to be in a state of crisis, the humanities seem to have emerged as university disciplines by a different route than the natural and social sciences, both earlier than these disciplines and left over after the sciences achieved preeminence at the turn of the twentieth century. ![]() This is the view of the historian, Lawrence Veysey, who writes that what we call the humanities were in fact “what was left” after the social sciences separated from the American Council of Learned Societies and formed their own organization, the Social Science Research Council, in 1923. The natural sciences had established their professional autonomy much earlier. Veysey goes on to question whether these remaining disciplines can be credited with any coherence at all: “We are left with the possibility that the grouping of the fields of history, English, classical and modern languages, philosophy, art, and music may at bottom be nothing more than a growing convenience—perhaps especially for deans and university presidents in neatly structuring their organizations” (57). This institutional nominalism is bracing, but it leaves the humanities with a very difficult task of defense. This task has become both more difficult and more urgent as a consequence of the nation’s ongoing financial crisis, which has given some policy makers an excuse to question the value of university degrees in the humanities. A meme has emerged in public discourse, asserting that English and other humanities majors fail to get jobs and that students would be wiser to major in STEM and other practical subjects such as business or communications. Several US governors have even proposed tuition penalties for students in their state universities who major in humanities. Not surprisingly, these attacks provoked a torrent of books, articles, reports, and blogs in defense of the humanities, all attesting to the value of critical thinking and other skills produced by humanities study. Many of the recent attacks on the humanities have no doubt been opportunistic, motivated as much by anti-intellectualism as by concern for the employment of graduates. And as researchers have begun to point out, claims about the failure of humanities graduates to find jobs are simply not true. Yet these defenses have had little effect in changing public opinion. Universities have seen enrollments in humanities fields drop by significant percentages, confirming the success of the attacks. I suggest that the strategy of defense has indeed reached an impasse and that it is time to consider a different way of representing the humanities in the public sphere. The weakness of current public defenses of the humanities—the outpouring of articles and blogs that began to appear in 2013’s “summer of the humanities”—arises above all from their failure to describe the objects of study in humanities disciplines, to make the demand of these objects upon our attention vivid and undeniable. Humanities scholars have devoted too much effort to declaring the purpose or value of humanities study—the why—and too little to giving an account of what they study.
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