The Humanities and Public Life
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20029668 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hilary Jewett (corresponding author) |
| Editors | Peter Brooks (0000-0003-4915-4986) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Pages | 172 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | The Humanities and Public Life (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Fordham University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5422/fordham/9780823257041.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W601507775 |
| Open Library | OL26832596M |
| ISBN | 9780823257041 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the “Torture Memos” released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible. Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about
Conscience · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Faith · Human rights · Humanities · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political science · Reading (process) · Sociology · Torture · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law · Human rights, moral and ethical aspects · Moral and ethical aspects · Reading
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2025 (12) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |