The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto

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In his famous classification of the sciences, Francis Bacon not only catalogued those branches of knowledge that already existed in his time, but also anticipated the new disciplines he believed would emerge in the future: the "desirable sciences." Mikhail Epstein echoes, in part, Bacon's vision and outlines the "desirable" disciplines and methodologies that may emerge in the humanities in response to the new realities of the twenty-first century. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should they have some active, constructive supplement We know that technology serves as the practical extension of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto addresses the question: Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to the transformative status of technology and politics It argues that we need a practical branch of the humanities which functions similarly to technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.

Reviews

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. -- S. Lenig, Columbia State Community College * CHOICE *
The Transformative Humanities will be, for many scholars, a jump-start to critical inquiry across literary studies and philosophy alike. -- Aaron Colton, University of Virginia * College Literature *

Author Bio

Mikhail Epstein is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 20 books and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991); The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions (London); the International Essay Contest set up by Lettre International and Weimar - Cultural City of Europe, 1999; and The Liberty Prize, awarded annually for "the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations" (New York, 2000). Igor E. Klyukanov is Professor of Communication Studies at Eastern Washington University. He has authored more than 100 articles, book chapters and books in communication theory, semiotics, translation studies, general linguistics, and intercultural communication. His works have been published in U.S., Russia, England, Spain, Costa Rica, Serbia, Bulgaria, India and Morocco. He served as an associate editor of The American Journal of Semiotics and is the founding editor of the Russian Journal of Communication.