Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach

by Frederick Luis Aldama

Overview

This wide-ranging study of the influence of postmodernism on contemporary culture offers a trenchant and uplifting defense of the humanities.
 
Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and even the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers in a variety of disciplines to affirm essential concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty.
 
Through a lens of “new humanism,” Frederick Aldama provides a liberating examination of the current cultural repercussions of assertions by such revolutionary theorists as Said, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, as well as Latin Americanists such as Sommer and Mignolo. Emphasizing pedagogy and popular culture with equal verve, Aldama presents an enlightening way to explore what “culture” actually does—who generates it and how it shapes our identities—and the role of academia in sustaining it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292784345
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	02/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	391
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction. A New Humanism
Chapter One. Self, Identity, and Ideas
Chapter Two. Revisiting Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault
Chapter Three. Derrida Gets Medieval
Chapter Four. Imaginary Empires, Real Nations
Chapter Five. Edward Said Spaced Out
Chapter Six. Modernity, What?
Chapter Seven. Teachers, Scholars, and the Humanities Today
Chapter Eight. Translation Matters
Chapter Nine. Can Music Resist?
Chapter Ten. The "Cultural Studies Turn" in Brown Studies
Chapter Eleven. Pulling up Stakes in Latin/o American Theoretical Claims
Chapter Twelve. Fugitive Thoughts on Justice and Happiness
Chapter Thirteen. Why Literature Matters
Chapter Fourteen. Interpretation, Interdisciplinarity, and the People
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Porter Abbott

In his wide-ranging new study, Frederick Aldama is ahead of the curve, ratcheting up the kind of synthetic, interdisciplinary work one finds in writers like Frans de Waal, Patrick Colm Hogan, Andy Clark, and Susan Oyama to a vision of the humanities itself as a field permeated everywhere by scientific insight. In this, Aldama energetically pursues what E. O. Wilson called 'consilience,' but at its broadest level and with a respect both for scientific reductionism and for its limitations at this level of complexity.
— Porter Abbott, Research Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Timothy Brennan

This is one of the most versatile, colloquially written, and philosophically astute readings of the American politics of race and the university that one can find anywhere. In the name of a 'new humanism' based on struggle, Aldama draws (at times humorously) on his experiences as a teacher to give a persuasive account of the self based (of all things) on neuroscience and evolutionary biology. An exciting book.
— Timothy Brennan, Professor, Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and English, University of Minnesota