Contemporary Humanities—
My question is: isn’t current humanities work almost entirely the history of the humanities? What would it look like if we focused on contemporary humanities, 21st century humanities studies?
- In languages, they do this already: contemporary film TV, etc. used to teach contemporary language skills.
- In English, it could mean post-2000 texts. But couldn’t it also mean ‘contemporary approaches to literature’ meaning both new writing and new (and continuing) ways of studying texts?
- Philosophy: both new philosophical texts and new approaches to philosophical study?
- Religion: new religions and new approaches?
- History: current approaches to studying history, new archives, contemporary history (Obama presidency, for example)
- Art & Music—contemporary forms and approaches
Across fields, it could mean studying new forms of each: film, video, blogs, as texts. Youtube. Social media texts—what gets published as twitters, as facebook posts, as blogs? What kinds of spaces are these?
What do students read/watch/listen to? How would they define & populate ‘contemporary humanities’?
Can/should include students’ humanities works, (poetry, art, etc.) and their ideas about how to study these fields.
But is all of this bull? Is it pandering? It doesn’t come from the (old!) idea of making humanities relevant, exactly. Rather, thinking how sciences, psych, economics, have a focus on the ‘right now’ of their fields. Are STEM fields compelling not just for their job-related content but also for their immediacy, sense of studying the ‘real world’?
History is important! I love teaching the Victorian novel, Virginia Woolf, etc. Students lack a historical perspective—they’re now confusing 1930s with 1830s. It’s also easy to ‘be the teacher’, be the one who knows, who conveys that knowledge to the class.
Most of us, I think, include a bit of this already: looking at contemporary works of art, introducing students to contemporary theories in the discipline.
How is this related to Marc Bosquet’s ‘writers and writing’? His proposal merges creative writing, reading writers, writing in academia. Moving between reading others and writing one’s own products.
What if we designed a course from the contemporary perspective? A Humanities INQ? Joint teaching, small class, figure out how to grade units/student work.
Example: films-of-novels: read the novel, study its reception over time, study the film as reception, watch the film in a theater and study the experience.
Or—and this we could perhaps get funding for—we set up a summer institute on the contemporary humanities, and have stipends for a one or two week session on this topic, where we present to each other what the heck is going on in our fields these days. And then perhaps a course could come out of this.
Christine Loflin's teaching and learning site 