Useful Humanism

Extract

I used to worry a lot about what good we do in the humanities. Sometimes I'd get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher's chain of thought that my thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questions of their importance. The moments that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that literary genre or motif or formal property. They didn't doubt that preparing to teach in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege. But what redeems the profession from irresponsibility? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother's attention to her children? Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when the same barbs that bother us may prick their conscience if they manage to land a job?