The Humanities and Public Life / Peter Brooks.
Brooks, Peter, author.; Brooks, Peter, contributor.; Buckwald, Craig, contributor.; Butler, Judith, contributor.; Hexter, Ralph J., contributor.; Jewett, Hilary, contributor.; Kahn, Paul W., contributor.; Larmore, Charles, contributor.; Lear, Jonathan, contributor.; Scarry, Elaine, contributor.; Williams, Patricia J., contributor.
2014
AZ103 .H846 2014
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Title
The Humanities and Public Life / Peter Brooks.
Author
ISBN
9780823257089
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2014]
Copyright
©2014
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (172 p.)
Item Number
10.1515/9780823257089 doi
Call Number
AZ103 .H846 2014
Dewey Decimal Classification
001.3
Summary
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 heartsis 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.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
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print 9780823257058
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ordinary, Incredulous
Part One. Is There an Ethics of Reading?
Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading
The Ethics of Reading
Responses and Discussion
Part Two. The Ethics of Reading and the Professions
The Raw and the Half-Cooked
Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator
Responses and Discussion
Part Three. The Humanities and Human Rights
The Call of Another's Words
On Humanities and Human Rights
Responses and Discussion
Concluding Discussion
Notes
List of Contributors
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ordinary, Incredulous
Part One. Is There an Ethics of Reading?
Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading
The Ethics of Reading
Responses and Discussion
Part Two. The Ethics of Reading and the Professions
The Raw and the Half-Cooked
Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator
Responses and Discussion
Part Three. The Humanities and Human Rights
The Call of Another's Words
On Humanities and Human Rights
Responses and Discussion
Concluding Discussion
Notes
List of Contributors