Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

What is so controversial about the Humanities that they have become such a domain of contention? There is a concerted drive in influential political and corporate spheres to curtail them drastically if not to eliminate them entirely, separating humanities from professional and technical schools to develop new configurations of study by re-bundling the traditional disciplines and hybridizing programs? How is the field of literature and literary studies implicated in it so that the very continuance of its relevance as an area of academic learning and research may depend on upholding the indispensability of the humanities to education and literacy? The proposed paper tackles these questions and offers some key points of reflection without which a meaningful reimagining of the concept may not be possible: i) Knowledge produced by the humanities demonstrates that reason and logic may be as much of a prison house, as much prone to prejudice and tribal bias, as superstition and intuitive faith and beliefs; ii) Claims of universality for the classics ignore the diversity of societies that inhabit the earth and the education, belief systems, and cultural practices that sustain them; iii) Humanities or humanist study is not independent of the political, economic, and social practices of one’s society, state, or region. The paper argues for a reorientation of the humanities that would challenge some of their basic assumptions by instrumentalizing them, accommodating in them other modes of knowledge acquisition and formation, and emphasizing the interconnectedness of disciplines instead of their separation.