a guest post by Daniel H.
On January 6th, the prominent theorist, writer and scholar Stanley Fish wrote an intriguing article in the New York Times, called “Will the Humanities Save Us?” In it, he makes the following claim:
You can talk … about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people.
If this is true, it presents serious problems for our culture. I wish to discuss why this might be a problem though I understand it may be a bold move to counter a guy like Stanley Fish. This being said, however, I feel that it may be possible to offer an intelligent reply to his somewhat myopic article. Also, I want to relate this discussion to our larger conversation concerning “change” in our lives.
Continue reading ‘Death of the Humanities? A response to Stanley Fish [Guest Post]‘
