humanities
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #153: Julie Schumacher
“I have to confess here that I never studied Shakespeare in college.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
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Reshaping Humanities in the Middle East
Though every time I hear it, I can’t help but cringe a little. It reeks of insularity. Have you read what’s coming out of the Arab world right now? I thought when I heard that question again this year. That’s…
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The Sickly Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Dig the grave and let me lie Glad did I live and gladly die Humanities profiles Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson and looks at how his constant struggle with illness influenced his writing.
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Stop Measuring the Humanities with Dollar Signs
Even though liberal arts degrees are actually good for business, Matt Burriesci (author of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World) believes that supporters of the humanities should lay that argument to…
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Weekly Geekery
How one troll came to repent for his sins. Speaking of trolls, they probably all have bad hearts. There is real symbiosis between science and fiction. There is also symbiosis between medicine and literature. Why we shouldn’t fetishize “makers.” Awkward online?…
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Ourselves and Our World
Sensational headlines declaiming the death of the humanities often misunderstand what the humanities actually are. Paul A. Kottman explains that the practice of analyzing texts doesn’t just teach us how to think; it creates new ways of thinking: Whatever we…
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What Dreams May Come
In a culture where everything is assigned a market value, imagination isn’t in high demand. Over at The Millions, Chloe Benjamin wonders why some of imagination’s most vivid manifestations—dreams and fiction—fall so low on our priority list: But in the…
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The Literary Underground
Raphael Allison, at Guernica, fuses together his experience at this year’s MLA conference in Chicago with the subculture of the modernists in order to discuss the “crisis in the humanities”: Mods and literary academics are caught between the allure of wildness,…
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The Self-Fulfilling Death of Humanities
Fearing the depreciating value of the humanities fields drives away talent and financial resources, concludes Benjamin Winterhalter, writing for the Atlantic. Humanities subjects include research areas often difficult to assess through quantitative methods, but, despite policymakers’ interest in statistical data,…
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Bad News for English Majors
Last week, we blogged about how, contrary to popular opinion, English majors are, in fact, employable. But, argues Verlyn Klinkenborg, the misperception that the humanities are impractical career-wise is actually hurting the field, making it less practical in every way.…
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Is Neuroscience the Future of the Humanities?
As science and technology dominate our lives more and more each day, those of us in the humanities find ourselves increasingly on the defensive. One way to demonstrate the humanities’ relevance is with neuroscience. Brain scans not only show us…