  Letters Archive
Charting the
Humanities In this first communication as director of the Robert
Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, I take the
opportunity to express my appreciation for the
accomplishments of the previous director, Professor
Charles E. Scott. Under his supervision during its
first five years, the Center has become a vital
presence in the life of the College faculty, serving
as a forum for exchanges across increasingly
permeable disciplinary boundaries. I am also grateful
to Mona Frederick, Assistant Director of the Center,
for her resourcefulness and energy which has allowed
the Center to achieve solid institutional standing
and to anticipate a reasonably prosperous future. My
job is rendered immeasurably easier by stepping into
a flourishing and well-regarded program that benefits
the University in a variety of ways.
The Center is within sight of meeting a challenge
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The NEH has offered $480,000 to be matched by
Vanderbilt at a rate of four to one. The resulting
sum is in tended to serve as an endowment, the
interest of which will under write the faculty
seminars, guest faculty and lecturers, and other
activities of the Center. The work and ambitions of
the Center have been greatly helped by this aspect of
the Campaign for Vanderbilt. We thank those who have
so generously donated to the Center which seeks both
to commemorate and elaborate on the legacy of writers
and other thinkers associated with Vanderbilt and the
South, among them Robert Penn Warren for whom the
Center is named.
Our program is rooted in the particular nature of
this university community but also participates in
the intellectual progress of the study of the
humanities. As a disciplinary program within the
College of Arts and Science, the humanities have not
changed that greatly when viewed in terms of how the
liberal arts curriculum is arranged. While my own
field of history is more closely connected to the
humanities than twenty or thirty years ago (at
Vanderbilt it is still part of the social sciences in
bureaucratic terms), the major department components
of the humanities remain English, foreign languages
and literatures, art history, philosophy, religious
studies, and rhetoric. What has changed is how the
humanities are seen in relation to a tradition of
knowledge attempting to teach and preserve eternal
and cultural verities. The position of the humanities
within the university and society has been made more
prominent by controversies over what is involved in
the enterprise of studying texts from the past. If
they are not to be regarded as constituting
unchanging, grand aspirations-if humanists are not
guardians or acolytes at a series of shrines-what are
we doing? If we are showing the contingent and
political basis of grand narratives, why are our
colleagues in the social sciences seemingly so
complacent with regard to a society whose troubled
foundations humanists endeavor to expose?
A humanities center is a site for the exchange of
critical approaches to art and literature, but not
only this. It also exists to preserve and expound
ideas of long standing if not quite eternal coherence
as well as to pull them apart. To emphasize the
contemporary or the theoretical does not mean
abandoning appreciation for the pleasures of the
past.
Among the unexpected and paradoxical beneficiaries of
shifts in critical approaches are historians who can
only applaud some effort at contextualization. Where
earlier schools of literary criticism sought to lift
texts out of their historical location into an
empyrean of the true and the good (or as barricades
against the decline of the West), we have at least
rediscovered the social and mental worlds inhabited
by writers and artists, the greatest as well as minor
or neglected ones. To flirt briefly with the
confessional, personal voice, I as a college senior
was bitterly mocked for daring to think of Chaucer in
relation to medieval social and theological ideas (at
that time a heretical idea identified with the late
D. W. Robertson of Princeton and Chapel Hill). I am
happy that such historicist contextualization is no
longer completely unthinkable but even fashionable
(in an admittedly rather different key).
Much of the effort of new forms of criticism is to
give voice to the past and to rediscover those whose
voices have been ignored or difficult to hear. In my
field of medieval history, the difficulty of looking
at the past in something approaching its own terms
has always been a problem. In England and the United
States the dominant paradigm of twentieth-century
scholarship has been to normalize the Middle Ages, to
make it appear less exotic, and to emphasize its
status as the foundational era of the modern. This
has been a reaction to the Gothic fantasies of the
nineteenth century. Medievalists have been at
(largely unsuccessful) pains to convince their
students that the "Dark Ages" is a misnomer, that the
centuries between 500 and 1500 saw not only the birth
of Europe but the beginnings of parliamentary
democracy, romantic affection, universities, and even
the discovery of the individual as a complex,
internally contradictory agent in uneasy relation to
society.
Such an approach tends to suppress the otherness of
this era. Religious heresies become fore runners of
tolerance, merchants the originators of the middle
class, kings the avatars of the modern state. It has
been possible, in recent years, aided by a
diminishing confidence in the modern as the epitome
of progress, to restore some of the color and
strangeness to the study of medieval culture. In this
sense, critical theories regarding difference,
gender, representation, and embodiment have provided
us with a more disturbing, complex, and I would
argue, true Middle Ages, one in which the behavior of
nobles, saints, clergy, and peas ants is understood
closer to its own terms than to the supposed modern
outcomes. What has occurred is not so much the
discovery of new sources as an interpretive shift,
from the normalizing to the contested.
There is a danger of reinventing a teleological
subservience to the present, however. Instead of
giving rise to the modern state or individual, the
Middle Ages is presented as the foundational era for
colonialism, racism, or the intertwined cults of
romanticism and violence. Contemporaneity is
rediscovered only if the value given to contemporary
society is altered. Myths of origin come to serve a
pessimistic construction of modernity which is itself
seen as sufficiently grotesque for the medieval to
lose its exoticness. I mention this not as an
excursus into a realm of esoterica but as an example
among many of the difficulties in charting a future
for the humanities. If they are not to form a bulwark
of agreed-upon marks of excellence, how much will
they trouble, overturn, play with earlier certainties
and nostrums?
For more information, contact the Center's executive director, Mona C. Frederick. [ RPW Center for the Humanities | About the Center | Visiting Fellowship Information | Howard Lecture Series | Seminars and Programs | Programs since 1987 ] [ Vanderbilt University | Site Index | Search Vanderbilt | Help ]
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