Heller also quotes Schnapp as saying, "'There's no commensurability between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,' he said. They weren't even close."
In addition, Heller says, "Stephen Greenblatt, one of the highest ranking humanities professors [and Shakespeare scholar at Harvard] by the stripes and badges of the trade, told me that he's come to think that literary students had a future somewhere other than the page. 'It happens that we do have a contemporary form of very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study,' he said. We were sitting in his paper-piled office. 'And that is long-form television. "The Wire," "Breaking Bad," "Chernobyl" - there are dozens of these now.' He rocked back to rest his feet on the edge of his desk. 'It's a fantastic invention'" (italics in Heller's text).
Heller also says of Greenblatt, "He liked to think of Shakespeare reading "Don Quixote" in 1612, and marveling at this new narrative form: the novel! So it was today, with "Better Call Saul." He wondered whether literature departments should do more with TV."
Now, Heller also quotes an unnamed English professor. "'The age of Anglophilia is over, one late-career English professor told me. 'It's like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world - the memorization of lines and competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.' The great age of the novel had served a cloistered, highly regionalized readership, but that, too, had changed. 'I don't thinking reading novels is now the only way to have broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face,' he said."
Heller also says, "In Harvard Square one afternoon, I met Saul Glist, a tall history-and-literature major. Glist had been drawn toward his field, he said, because in his humanities classes he felt less like a student absorbing information and more like a young thinker. . . . But Glist resisted the narrative of diminishment. 'The question we should be asking is not whether the humanities have any role in our society or the university in fifty or a hundred years!' he exclaimed. 'It's what do investments in the humanities look like - and what kind of ideal future can we imagine?'" (italics in Heller's text).
Once again, we come across a statement that could have served as a springboard for Heller to discuss Nussbaum's argument about the humanities and democracy.
(Article changed on Mar 05, 2023 at 9:02 AM EST)
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