Literature And Politics – serie

Humanities Theory pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a period of significant change. For these reasons, it has become important to analyse and understand what the humanities are as a whole, beyond disciplinary divisions and yet without resorting to simplistic notions of their worth. Remarkably little attention has been paid to this topic. Most discussions of the humanities have been polemical if not defensive.This book argues that there exists a global humanities world which not only transcends disciplinary divisions but joins the professional academic humanities to a thriving amateur public humanities. This world has no essence, it is plural. Nevertheless, powerful, if contested, ethical orientations run through it and help shape it, including a will to truthfulness, a will to openness and generosity, a will to examine values.In their essays Simon During and Amanda Anderson each bring different emphases to their shared orientation towards a large plural humanities world: During analyses how key disciplines--sociology, philosophy and history--might be used to think about the humanities as a whole and, on this basis, offers some predictions of the future awaiting the humanities.Anderson analyzes media representations of the humanities and considers the general conceptual frameworks through which the humanities focus on value and proffer critique. She analyses a series of examples of contemporary critical engagements in the humanities to press a case for value pluralism in the humanities and the university more broadly.

Humanities Theory pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a period of significant change. For these reasons, it has become important to analyse and understand what the humanities are as a whole, beyond disciplinary divisions and yet without resorting to simplistic notions of their worth. Remarkably little attention has been paid to this topic. Most discussions of the humanities have been polemical if not defensive.This book argues that there exists a global humanities world which not only transcends disciplinary divisions but joins the professional academic humanities to a thriving amateur public humanities. This world has no essence, it is plural. Nevertheless, powerful, if contested, ethical orientations run through it and help shape it, including a will to truthfulness, a will to openness and generosity, a will to examine values.In their essays Simon During and Amanda Anderson each bring different emphases to their shared orientation towards a large plural humanities world: During analyses how key disciplines--sociology, philosophy and history--might be used to think about the humanities as a whole and, on this basis, offers some predictions of the future awaiting the humanities.Anderson analyzes media representations of the humanities and considers the general conceptual frameworks through which the humanities focus on value and proffer critique. She analyses a series of examples of contemporary critical engagements in the humanities to press a case for value pluralism in the humanities and the university more broadly.

Ideal societies, better worlds, more just and peaceful ways of living: these have long been the stuff of social dreaming. In this compact volume, two leading scholars from different disciplines join to consider the life of utopian imagining within the frame of literature and politics. Duncan Bell, a political scientist and intellectual historian, opens the book with a critical overview of the Anglophone utopian tradition and a fresh definition of utopia. He then shows how the threat of technological annihilation, and the promise of transcendence of human limitations, has shaped utopian and dystopian writing of the last hundred years. Douglas Mao, a scholar of literature, begins the second part of the book by delving into utopian literature's vexed relation to sentimental feeling, especially as this is signalled by speculation on how inhabitants of utopia themselves would read literary works. He then shows how utopian writing's orientation to problem-solving puts it into surprising relation with both politics and literature in general. An interview in which the two authors compare their methods and conclusions closes out the book.