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  • The Trouble with an Airtight CaseThe Rhetoric of Method or the Rhetoric of Urgency?
  • Kurt Spellmeyer (bio)
The Value of the Humanities. By Helen Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Anyone concerned about the humanities will probably hear of this book by Helen Small, a professor of English at Oxford. Small’s book will win praise from many readers, but fewer will look past its many strengths to its weaknesses. Broadly learned but unaffected, judicious yet generous and lively, Small is a thinker of such intelligence that her argument is likely to win the same respect from historians and philosophers — and even social scientists and scientists — that it will receive from fellow literary critics and those of us who work in writing studies. Yet despite the book’s virtues, I cannot easily believe that anyone outside a university would find, after wading through a chapter or so, reasons to pick the book up again. Why those outside readers would remain so far apart from us on this score is a problem Small does not seem to recognize, let alone address.

Many defenders of the humanities — so many it gets harder and harder to keep up — have tried to make a case the public might accept by arguing for the unique urgency of the current crisis. The argument from urgency asks readers to believe that the humanities must be preserved “or else,” with various or-elses invoked. One illustration of this rhetorical device — which Small pointedly declines to employ — is Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2012). [End Page 569] That democracy needs the humanities Small finds unconvincing. But democracy, for her, is tangential anyway: she rejects the rhetoric of urgency in favor of the rhetoric of method because she wants to make a measured, reasoned argument that sidesteps the pitfalls attendant on partisanship and advocacy. Of course, Nussbaum is not the only one to employ the trope of crisis, but Small treats it as a liability wherever it might raise its head. Rather than sign up with the engagées, she invites her readers to step back and survey their home turf with an eye carefully trained by literary-critical tradition, logic, and a wide acquaintance with the past. The reader, however, should be forewarned. If you decide to go along with her, what you will get is not an argument for the humanities per se but a survey of such arguments, starting with the British nineteenth century. When I first tried to compare the book to anything else in my prior reading, I was at a loss until, suddenly, I recalled Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which does not perform criticism itself but claims to lay the proper foundation for doing so thereafter. In much the same way, though more modestly, Small urges us to stop flailing around and contemplate systematically what can be said about the things we do.

Small aggregates defenses of the humanities into five general categories that provide a title or subtitle for each of her main chapters: (1) distinctness from other disciplines, (2) use and usefulness, (3) contribution to happiness, (4) the claim that “democracy needs us,” and (5) the humanities for their own sake. Having tried for five or ten minutes to come up with other, more apt substitutes, I was surprised to acknowledge just how comprehensive these categories seem — a testimony to Small’s critical skill, as well as to her capacious reading, which includes everyone from Jeremy Bentham to Bruce Robbins. But the categories might feel comprehensive for another reason: they approach the humanities in a way that removes them from what she describes as “the current state of institutional debate, which will quickly date.” Instead, the categories encourage us to be “more abstractly philosophical” about the arguments in circulation by assessing “where they work, what they imply, [and] under what conditions they will cease to have credibility or must acknowledge limits on their credibility” (7). Such an approach has much to recommend it: in order to defend the humanities, we need to know what they are, and as Small shows, the closer to them we draw, the less adequate our assumptions seem...

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