This section of Criticality is a place for exploring the traditional humanistic disciplines of language, literature, history, philosophy, religion, the visual arts, and the performing arts, focusing on how these disciplines changed in the twentieth century as a result of new ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, language, history, society, and culture.
A Tension between Theory and Practice
The term “humanities” derives from the Renaissance Latin phrase studia humanitatis. The Latin word studia (plural of studium) is of course the source of the English word “study,” but the Latin word refers more to a pursuit or practice than to the academic study of a field of inquiry. So the studia humanitatis are in fact more the practical pursuits of humankind than they are academic studies. On this view, language is as much about rhetoric and composition as it is about grammar and vocabulary; literature is as much about creative writing as it is about literary criticism or history; philosophy is as much about living the good life as it is about epistemology or logic. In a word, the humanities are as much about doing as they are about knowing.
Postmodern Humanism
As I work on this section, it is becoming clear to me that the critique I want to pursue is to some extent an account of what I am calling postmodern humanism: not the traditional humanism that prevailed from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, but rather a different humanism that emerged in the course of the twentieth century and continues to evolve today. In the postmodern humanities, we do indeed teach and learn about language, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and the visual and performing arts; but we do so in the context of critical thinking, critical theory, and critical pedagogy. Thus, we focus on the difference made to humanism and the humanities by a range of iconic thinkers including Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida, to name just a bare few.
On the Following Pages
Thus, on each of the pages in this section, you will (eventually) find an account of a specific humanities discipline from the perspective of postmodern humanism. Generally, this will include a contrast between how the discipline was traditionally conceived from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and how it changed in the twentieth century as a result of new ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, language, history, society, and culture.
I do not come to these pages with these ideas totally preformed or preformulated. Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” He was talking primarily about poetry, but the same may be said of other kinds of writing, including the kind of critical writing I am attempting in these pages. I’ve created these pages with titles, but it is only as I contemplate the big blank area in the text editor that I decide precisely what I want to say about the postmodern humanism of language, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and the visual and performing arts.