Search results for ""Author Geoffrey Galt Harpham""

In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the humanities - the academic disciplines that study the potential of the human - represent a 'dream of America.' They were, Harpham contends, invented after World War II as an expression of American culture and character, and were advanced by their supporters as an instrument of American national interests. Although the humanities are struggling to retain their status in America today, the concept has spread to many other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and attractive contributions to higher education. "The Humanities and the Dream of America" explores a number of linked problems: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by modern philology in the discipline's formation; the reasons behind the humanities' perpetual state of crisis; and, the new possibilities for literary study afforded by the subject of pleasure. Framed by essays that draw on Harpham's pedagogical experiences abroad and as a lecturer at the US Air Force Academy, as well as his vantage as director of the National Humanities Center, this book provides an essential perspective on the history, ideology, and future of the humanities.

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A powerful and original argument that the practice of scholarship is grounded in the concept of radical freedom, beginning with the freedoms of inquiry, thought, and expression.Why are scholars and scholarship invariably distrusted and attacked by authoritarian regimes? Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that at its core, scholarship is informed by an emancipatory agenda based on a permanent openness to the new, an unlimited responsiveness to evidence, and a commitment to conversion. At the same time, however, scholarship involves its own forms of authority. As a worldly practice, it is a struggle for dominance without end as scholars try to disprove the claims of others, establish new versions of the truth, and seek disciples.Scholarship and Freedom threads its general arguments through examinations of the careers of three scholars: W. E. B. Du Bois, who serves as an example of scholarly character formation; South African Bernard Lategan, whose New Testament studies became entangled on both sides of his country’s battles over apartheid; and Linda Nochlin, whose essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” virtually created the field of feminist art history.

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Geoffrey Galt Harpham's book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, "Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?" The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because "it was the first time anyone had asked me that." Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor. That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters--which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.

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In this bold interdisciplinary work, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that asceticism has played a major role in shaping Western ideas of the body, writing, ethics, and aesthetics. He suggests that we consider the ascetic as "the 'cultural' element in culture," and presents a close analysis of works by Athanasius, Augustine, Matthias, Grünewald, Nietzsche, Foucault, and other thinkers as proof of the extent of asceticism's resources. Harpham demonstrates the usefulness of his findings by deriving from asceticism a "discourse of resistance," a code of interpretation ultimately more generous and humane than those currently available to us.

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Geoffrey Galt Harpham's book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, "Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?" The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because "it was the first time anyone had asked me that." Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor. That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters--which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.

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