What arts and humanities can mean to our living: a review essay

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2004 by Aquila, Dominic A

What arts and humanities can mean to our living: a review essay

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (The University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Kurt Spellmeyer, Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humantties for the Twenty-first Century (State University of New York Press, 2003).

Curtis White, The Middle Mind: WHy Americans Don't Think For Themselves (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003).

With the eclipse of Christianity as a public force in American life, many fin-de-siecle Americans invested the Western tradition of arts and humanities with the burden of forming lives and shaping imaginations. In the schools and universities, great literature, classics, history, philosophy, and art supplied exemplary answers to the perennial questions: How ought we to live? What work is worthy of a life? The three books under review in this article directly and indirectly underscore the failure of the project, and indeed the ways in which it was misconceived from the beginning.

Kurt Spellmeyer writes from the perspective of an accomplished and energetic university teacher-scholar. Rutgers recently recognized Spellmeyer's achievements in successfully integrating teaching and research with its 2004 Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award. Among other things, Spellmeyer designs Rutgers' undergraduate writing course which annually instructs eleven thousand. He also trains and oversees scores of instructors who teach these challenging writing-intensive classes. Widely admired for his love of learning, attentiveness to students, and enthusiasm for introducing students to the life of the mind, Spellmeyer models the imaginative and well-informed mediator between the tradition of Western humanities and contemporary students. Arts of Living blends his research and practice in teaching with the social and cultural history of the humanities. The result is a sustained critique of specialization in the arts and humanities.

Like John Guillory and Curtis White, the other two authors considered herein, Spellmeyer rejects the terms of the current culture wars in which the Left and the Right have hijacked the humanities for their own narrow and provincial purposes. Conservatives seek to preserve and revere the humanities as untouchable museum pieces, "stainless monuments of Western thought" (Spellmeyer, 4). For their part, writers on the Left set out to smash these monuments, but wind up cocooning them in layers of arcane and trendy literary theories-deconstructionism, semiology, and post-structuralism, among others. Both camps end up distancing the arts and humanities from ordinary human concerns, and in so doing confirm the widely held suspicion-so prevalent among undergraduates-that they are irrelevant or the special preserve of an intellectual elite. Against these parochial intellectual currents, Spellmeyer argues that how we instruct students to think, read and write is crucially important for their self-knowledge and self-understanding and for their ability to puncture clichés and mystifying theories. Such "pre-packaged analytical systems" function as easy reach-me-downs to explain literature and its relation to the world around them. Arts of Living has already had an impact on teaching and writing about the humanities inasmuch as it is the centerpiece of two separate panels at an upcoming national conference in composition studies.

Arts of Living ranges widely but keeps its focus closely on the cult of the expert professor that dominates the arts and humanities. Spellmeyer traces its origins to the late nineteenth century cultural shift toward professionalization aimed at consolidating and organizing nearly every field of human knowledge and practice, from management to medicine, from social work to academic research. A cultural populist at heart, Spellmeyer laments the pervasiveness of the Progressivist project, which eventually succeeded in expertly administering everything, including the humanities. Under this regime the humanities came under the near-exclusive control of the academy, and in the process cast a cloud of opprobrium over so-called amateur attempts to appropriate the humanities for enjoyment and enrichment. Following the German model of the organization of knowledge in the university, the humanities fractured into disciplinary specialties, which, as Spellmeyer argues, brought about a different type of knowledge well suited to mastery and control and less amenable to collaboration and the pleasure of communal discovery. The new power of the expert specialist encouraged a tutelary habit of mind that then, as now, instructs "ordinary" people about who they truly are and the real meaning of their deeds.

The progressive cult of the expert was not restricted to the professions and the academy, but extended to debates on the nature of American democracy. The New Republic, founded in 1917, Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, among other magazines and books, argued for the privileged position of experts in a modern democracy-the only ones capable of negotiating the complexities of twentieth-century life. Against Lippmann and the cult of expertise stood such cultural populists as William James, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Rosenfeld. As Spellmeyer writes, these figures argued that ordinary people, who knew first hand the irrepressible connection of knowledge to everyday life, and precisely not experts, were most fit to lead a democratic society. The debate over the nature of democratic culture was well fought on fairly even terms from the 1910s until the outbreak of World War II, after which the populist argument fell into desuetude. Spellmeyer's analysis of the populist cultural tradition pays especially close attention to Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, observing that Agee understood that everything men and women do in their workaday lives-preparing food, tending to children, executing complex technical tasks, writing, or building roads-might be understood as deeds and empathetic acts when they afford an encounter with the world outside oneself, and also with the world as self (Spellmeyer, 116).