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 *
Mikhail Epsteins The Transformative Humanities is a critical manifesto for our times. The humanities, denigrated, underfunded, abandoned, and increasingly seen as irrelevant, are here rethought and reordered. Not a claim for a more economically viable or culturally more relevant form of the humanities; not an argument that states we need the humanities to make better citizens or more humane professionals, Epstein looks at the core of the humanities and sees its vitality and strength undiminished beneath layers of disciplinary morbidity and administrative pandering. A book that ALL humanists need to read to understand the problems and the advantages of the humanities in the 21st century. * Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University, USA *
An unforeseen boon of the 1989-91 revolutions in the Soviet bloc has been the re-invigoration of Western intellectual life. Eastern European thinkers encountered with fresh eyes, and much unease, the theories and attitudes that arose in a Paris-dominated West from the heyday of Sartre to that of Badiou. Among the most significant and startling contributions since 89 have come to us from Mikhail Epstein, whos been setting thought experiments in motion since the time of Perestroika. Emerging from the Soviet bubble to take the measure of postmodernism, the first questions that Epstein posed were: Why post- Why not proto- His concern ever since has been to redirect humanists from self-pity toward 'inventorship.' 'Perhaps,' as he writes in The Transformative Humanities, 'twenty-first century society, and conceivably even academe itself, are turning away from the humanities because in the twentieth century, and especially in the second half, the humanities turned away from humans' The task he has set himself is no less than to invent concepts, reinvent attitudes, and engineer a technics that will render the humanities human at last. * Jeffrey M. Perl, Professor of English Literature, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Founding Editor of Common Knowledge *
It is widely recognized that we are in the midst of a crisis in how universities are organized, the ends they serve, and the place they hold in national life. The humanities are at the epicenter of changes now taking place. Mikhail Epstein is uniquely qualified to grasp the complex nature of the current dilemma, and more importantly, to provide a blueprint for the future that is both visionary and realistic. He is a thinker/activist who was tried in the crucible of late Soviet social, economic, and institutional chaos. He now brings the skills he developed in that historic moment of change to bear on our own. In an age in which a tsunami of sheer data threatens to overwhelm our capacity to make sense of it, Epsteins revolutionary project demonstrates how wisdom can triumph over brute information. His manifesto is one of the best informed, and most compelling arguments I know for education that is still centered on how to be human. * Michael Holquist, Professor Emeritus, Comparative and Slavic Literature, Yale University, USA *
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

Author: Mikhail Epstein is 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). Editor and Translator: IIgor 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. Author of Foreword: Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Princeton University, USA.