Toward the end of the Second World War, Christian humanists offered an alternative to understanding life in purely utilitarian terms. They failed to win many adherents, and the humanities continue to fail today. Ross Douthat pairs Alan Jacobs’s new book on Christian humanism with a recent study on the state of the humanities at American colleges.
A history of hymnbooks: “For new religious groups or fringe groups (the ones Phillips examines are African Methodists, Reform Jews, and Latter-day Saints), hymnbooks were one of the first acts of creating a visible identity. For denominations, too, hymnbooks were used to wage war or create peace by what was included, what was excluded, and how the books were published and circulated…Hymnbooks traveled with parishioners as personal devotional objects, aided in the emergence of the private self within a larger body (whether family or church), and even offered a handy tool for passing notes or disciplining children talking during a worship service.”
Robert Graves’s life “was, in every sense, chaotic, but purposely so. He believed that ‘tranquillity’ (the Wordsworthian recipe) narcotises true poetry. The poet, like the kettle, must boil to produce. A few weeks before Graves started on Good-bye to All That, Riding enlarged the ménageto quatre with an Irish literary adventurer. It went all wrong and she jumped out of a fourth-floor window in Hammersmith. Graves followed suit. Both survived.” John Sutherland reviews Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of the war poet.
Bradley J. Birzer on The Abolition of Man at 75.
The idea that avoiding losses is a bigger motivator in decision-making than achieving gains is false, David Gal and Derek Rucker argue.
Always read the fine print: She posed for a free photo shoot, then her face started showing up everywhere.
A Reader Recommends: Steve Abernathy recommends Eca de Queiroz’s Alves & Co. Steve writes: “A 2012 translation by Margaret Jull Costa, the novella Alves & Co. is a good introduction to Portugal’s greatest novelist. It’s an adultery story that finds the cuckold Godofredo Alves betrayed by his business partner. Godofredo’s subsequent plans and promises of vengeance evanesce in comic and costly scenarios.” Have a novel or a collection of short stories you’d like to recommend to fellow Prufrock readers? Send me an email at [email protected].
Essay of the Day:
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey J. Williams argues that professors should resist pressure to promote themselves and their writing to gain an “audience.” Instead, he writes, “we should recognize that we actually have a sizable public in our teaching”:
“The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.
“Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors.
“The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.
“Promotion runs through the institution. At my university, besides the central public-relations office, a few years ago a media person was hired to promote the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and last year we added one solely for the English department, who regularly sends out email blasts. We have meetings where we are asked to tap our inner marketer to figure out ways to promote our programs — worrying about a dip in enrollment, as if the problem is not the price of tuition, or the messages in our culture against the value of the humanities, or the pressure for an explicitly practical degree, but simply that we’re not promoting English enough. Besides providing course descriptions on our regular departmental list, we now advertise underenrolled classes with glossy posters.
“Colleagues elsewhere tell me about similar or more advanced cases of promotional fever. Graduate students at a nearby university report that they are pressured to promote their classes at risk of their funding if they don’t reach a certain enrollment (with posters, but they are also supposed to hunt down former students via email). One professor in the Midwest tells me that a publisher offered a contract based not on readers’ reports but on the size of the professor’s Twitter following.
“The promotional imperative has not only become part of institutional protocol; it permeates how we understand and conduct our own work and careers. We post pieces on Academia.edu, build our own sites, and paper Facebook with posts and links. At the behest of our publishers, we send information about our new books to any friend or acquaintance we’ve ever had, and cajole them to circulate it, like a chain letter. Friends are no longer just friends but conduits in one’s promotional circuit.
“The adage seems to be morphing from ‘publish or perish’ to ‘promote or perish.’”
“It is, of course, not a bad thing to circulate one’s scholarly work, or to say a good word about a colleague, college, or profession. But we’ve been overtaken by the codes and goals of advertising, without confidence in the normal channels of professional recognition. It does not especially matter what’s sold, only that it’s sold. The promotional imperative has become a self-generating motor of the contemporary academic sphere. Supplanting the model of the traditional scholar or the public intellectual, we have entered the era of the promotional intellectual, with damaging consequences for the academy and the life of the mind.”
Photos: Abandoned Russia
Poem: Paul Celan, “Three Poems” (Translated by Bruce Lawder)
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