Literature, the Humanities, and Humanity

Theodore Steinberg

7 annotations Mar 2025 data

Introduction

  • So it is not enough to say that we need to study the humanities. We also need to study how to study the humanities, which is itself, paradoxically, part of the humanities. If we simply make the humanities into another example of unthinking, rote learning, then we transform them into a means of oppression rather than liberation.
  • The humanities, then, take advantage of our ability to dance, to sing, to sculpt, to draw or paint, and to use language in order to show us both what we have been, what we are, and what we can be. And I cannot stress this point enough: the humanities have a dimension of enjoyment.
  • Intentions are a problem in studying literature. One complication is easily dispensed with. Teachers should never ask, "What was the author trying to say here?" The question, of course, implies that the author was an incompetent who was so unsuccessful in making a point that student readers have to decipher it. The real question is something like "What do these words say?" You may notice the phrasing of that question, which does not ask, "What does the author mean?" or "What does the author intend?"
  • A person who reads Sophocles' Oedipus the King and decides that the point of the play is "don't kill your father and marry your mother" has perhaps followed the action of the play but has missed the important points that the play makes. Of course, anyone who needs to read a play to learn that important lesson probably has other, more serious problems
  • One basis for such misconceptions is our uncertainty about what a work may be saying, which leads us to the easiest answer we can think of, an answer which is often a cliché or a moral truism. (This tendency is obviously related to our desire to get the one "correct" answer.)
  • Did a country actor named William Shakespeare really write these plays? This is actually a non-question. The answer makes no difference at all, and the question only concerns people who prefer not dealing with the plays. If the plays are so brilliant that we cannot believe they were written by a country actor, they are so brilliant that we cannot really imagine the mind that did create them. If that good-looking bald actor did not create them, then someone else did. What matters is the plays. We do not search Beowulf in order to learn its author's identity, and we do not read these plays to learn about Shakespeare.
  • Much of the word play in the play makes us aware of a subtext. The words, in their primary sense, mean one thing, but in their alternate sense they mean something quite different but something that bears on the major themes of the play. At one point Jaques reports the words of Touchstone: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven, And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot: And thereby hangs a tale. (II.vii.-28)