The Humanities and Public Life ed. by Peter Brooks (review)

The corporate university has not been kind to the humanities. Word on the street is that the humanities are in peril and that neoliberal educational practices and the growth of the corporate university are pushing them toward demise. Reductions in financial support, declining numbers of majors, and a general lack of understanding of the nature and value of the humanities are opening the door to a more instrumentally determined and vocationally centered vision of higher education.

But this is old news. Neoliberal academe is now normal academe. The notion that educational values are determined by market share is a commonplace one and the fact that majors and courses that cannot be directly connected to marketable skills and job attainment are at risk of extinction is well-known. This situation puts advocates of the humanities in the dire position of either establishing strategies to slow down the decline and fall of the humanities at the hands of the corporate university or finding themselves gradually effaced and marginalized within the brave new world of higher education. The Humanities and Public Life is a collective effort of some of the most celebrated and established figures in the humanities and related fields to fend off the destructive forces of the corporate university. Called together by Peter Brooks, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton University, and the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University, fifteen scholars, most of whom have named chairs or distinguished appointments, discuss some of the problems facing the humanities through a unique set-up.

Brooks says that after reading the “Torture Memos” released by the U.S. Department of Justice, where the use of torture was justified by “the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts” (1), he doubted such a justification could have been produced in good conscience by a person with a solid humanities education. “No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry,” writes Brooks, “could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: this is not right” (1). For Brooks, “the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading” (2).

Consequently, for Brooks, the notorious “Torture Memos” are more evidence of not only the continued need for “humanistic thought and analysis,” as a humanist in good conscience would not have produced them, but also that the “close reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields, and it should take its place in public life” (2). “The practice of reading itself, pursued with care and attention to language, its contexts, implications, uncertainties,” comments the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar, “can itself be an ethical act” (3).

To explore these claims and related ones, Brooks organized a symposium called “The Humanities in the Public Sphere.” The material in this book is the product of this symposium. It includes a twenty-plus page keynote lecture by Judith Butler, followed by six essays ranging from six to eight pages by Elaine Scarry, Charles Larmore, Patricia J. Williams, Ralph J. Hexter, Jonathan Lear, and Paul W. Kahn. The six essays are then grouped into twos, and receive two to five page responses by two or three additional scholars. The respondents are Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jonathan Culler, Derek Attridge, Richard Sennett, Michael Roth, William Germano, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Didier Fassin. Finally, after each of the three subgroups of essays and responses, there is a brief discussion that includes all of the participants as well as some audience members. The volume concludes with a ten page “Concluding Discussion,” where the participants make one or two statements. Oddly enough, though some passing references are made to it throughout the symposium, there is no discussion of or responses to Butler’s keynote lecture, which is a bit disappointing given its power and range.

With sixteen contributions of varying lengths, intensities, and agendas, it is simply not possible to do each of...