Yesterday, I posted on Stanley Fish’s question, “Will the Humanities Save Us?”  He followed that essay with this one, called “The Uses of the Humanities, Part II.” In this second essay, Fish makes a great and much-needed distinction on the humanities question.  He says, in effect, that the world is glad to have novelists and essayists and historians, but that the world is far more in doubt about the need for uber-critical and hyper-analytical “theorists” of the humanities.  This, I think, is a welcome distinction.

That’s right.  What is in need of defense is not the existence of Shakespeare, but the existence of the Shakespeare industry (and of the Herbert industry and of the Hemingway industry), with its seminars, journals, symposia, dissertations, libraries. The challenge of utility is not put (except by avowed Philistines) to literary artists, but to the scholarly machinery that seems to take those operating it further and further away from the primary texts into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosive theory. More than one poster decried the impenetrable jargon of literary studies. Why, one wonders, is the same complaint not made against physics or economics or biology or psychology, all disciplines with vocabularies entirely closed to the uninitiated?

The answer is that those disciplines are understood to be up to something and to be promising a payoff that will someday benefit even those who couldn’t read a page of their journals. What benefit do literary studies hold out to those asked to support them? Not much of anything except the (parochial) excitement experienced by those caught up in arcane discussions of the mirror stage, the trace, the subaltern and the performative. (Don’t ask.) The general public, which includes legislators, trustees, and parents, is on the side of my colleague at Johns Hopkins. Let them put on plays.

Fish may be writing in a rather cheeky manner here, but I’d have to say that his colleague at Johns Hopkins is right.  What the humanities need are teachers who teach students how to write and speak and read and think about the Permanent Things (love, virtue, duty, God, evil, etc.), which lead directly to a concern (after graduation) with the Current Things (government, education, race, legislation).