INTRODUCTION
1. The term “Torture Memos” was originally applied to three memos that originated from the United States Department of Justice on August 1, 2002 (and made public later): 1) Memorandum for Jack Rizzo, “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative”; 2) Memo for Alberto Gonzalez, “Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under U.S.C. 2340-2340A”; 3) Letter to The Honorable Alberto R. Gonzales from John Yoo. Further investigation and attention have brought later documents to light as well. See e.g. David Cole, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York: The New Press, 2009); see also The Torture Archive at http://www.aladin0.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/torture/torture.shtml.
2. Charles J. Sykes, Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper, 1991); Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do about It (New York: Times Books, 2010).
3. Anthony Grafton, “Our Flunking Universities,” New York Review of Books 68, no. 18 (November 24, 2011), 38–42.
4. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
5. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
6. U.S. Department of Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, Final Report of the Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education (2006), www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html.
7. Ibid., 13.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
10. Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1961), 383.
ORDINARY, INCREDULOUS
1. The National Humanities Alliance, in opposing the cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, takes the tack that one needs to restate the obvious: “The public value of the humanities is unquestioned. They enrich individual lives, they bring communities together, they underpin our civic institutions, they bring forth our history and our shared values, they make possible how our heritage is understood and preserved, and they support a broadly educated and competitive workforce.” Michael Brintnall, President, National Humanities Alliance, House Congressional Testimony FY 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Witness Testimony Submitted to the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, April 2012, www.nhalliance.org/advocacy/testimony/congressional-testimony-fy-2012-neh.shtml.
2. Lisa Foderaro, “Budget-Cutting Colleges Bid Some Languages Adieu,” New York Times, December 3, 2010.
3. Scott Jaschik, “Job Freefall, Job Recovery,” Inside Higher Education, January 3, 2011.
4. Peter Schmidt, “Historians Continue to Face Tough Job Market,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2011.
5. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008): 208–219.
6. See Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 21 (2009): 21; Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 7 (2003).
7. See Michelle Ty, “Higher Education on Its Knees,” Introduction to the Fall/Winter issue of Qui Parle 20, no. 1 (2011): 3–32.
8. In Santorum’s words, he was for his instructors “out of the pale”— a fine expression that combines, I surmise, “beyond the pale” with “out of the blue” or “out of the mainstream” and which suggests that he was regarded as outside the realm of the recognizable or that he had descended on that campus from a faraway planet or from the more unsavory recesses of whiteness. I do not think of the Nitney Lions huddled with a strong cohort of Heideggerians as a left-wing outpost, but perhaps that is to mistake the garbled syntax of a fantasy structure for a reasonable report on reality.
9. See Librotraficante.com for information on the Arizona law and its impact.
10. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 690–714.
11. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–93.
12. Ibid., 139.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 171.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 171–172
17. Ibid., 172.
18. Ibid., 173.
19. Franz Kafka, “Description of a Struggle,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 9–51.
20. Ibid., 35.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 36.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. Ibid., 36.
25. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1914–23, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 75.
26. Kafka, “Description,” 36.
27. Ibid.
28. See Alain Badiou, “Philosophy as Creative Repetition,” in The Symptom 8 (2009): “Stevens writes: ‘We must endure our thoughts all night.’ Alas! That is the destiny of philosophers and philosophy. And Stevens continues: ‘Until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.’ Yes, we hope, we believe that one day the ‘bright obvious’ will ‘stand motionless.’ ” I would add the following: For Stevens, it is unclear whether the time when the bright obvious will stand motionless is realizable, although it remains the ideal toward which those who endure their thoughts nevertheless move. If it proves unrealizable, endurance itself is the ultimate.
29. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958/1991), 1:43 (italics added).
30. As Randy Martin queries, “How might the humanities turn its own interpretive prowess, which has been developed through a critique of representation in textual forms, to public matters whose value and impact remains still very hard to discern?” in “Taking an Administrative Turn: Derivative Logics for a Recharged Humanities” Representations 116 (2011): 170.
31. Geoffrey Harpham, “From Eternity to Here: Shrinkage in American Thinking About Higher Education,” Representations 116, no. 1 (2011): 57.
32. Wendy Brown, “The End of Educated Democracy,” Representations 116, no. 1 (2011): 19–41.
33. Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
34. See the “Dictionary” subheading at www.Investopedia.com.
35. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
POETRY, INJURY, AND THE ETHICS OF READING
1. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking-Penguin, 2011). I have just summarized Pinker’s argument in a much more conservative or modest form than Pinker himself does because I am more certain of its truthfulness in that form. Although his overall argument about the greatly diminished rate of violence does not persuade me, certainly his documentation of the many specific forms of cruelty that have subsided does persuade me. I regard the book as a magnificent achievement on many grounds: the importance of its subject, the ambition of its research and documentation, the eloquent formulation of both historical events and philosophic arguments, and the patience and lucidity of its inquiry. Nevertheless, from my perspective, the book has major substantive misjudgments (most importantly, his belief that use of nuclear weapons is now taboo when in fact it is only public discussion of our ever-ready nuclear arsenal that is taboo) and misleading stylistic habits (such as acknowledging that a given harm occurs at both the outset and the close of a given era—whether millennia, century, or decade—but then using vivid images and numbers only at the terminus that is far away from us and an abstract word at the close-by terminus).
2. Ibid., 173, figure 4–9.
3. Ibid., 173.
4. Ibid., 175, 176, describing Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 38–69.
5. Pinker, Better Angels, 174.
6. On the difference between legal and literary approaches to injury, see Elaine Scarry, “Das SchwierigeBild der Anderen,” in SchwierigeFremdheit: Über Integration und Ausgrenzung in Einwanderungsländern, ed. R. Habermas, P. Nanz, and F. Balke (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1993), 229–264. The English version, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” can be found in Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence, ed. Eugene Weiner (New York: Abraham Fund, 1998); and in Human Rights and Historical Contingency, ed. Carla Hesse and Robert Post (Berkeley: University of California, 1999). A brief version occurs in For Love of Country, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
7. Pope wrote, “Apollo tun’d the Lyre; the Muses round / With voice alternate aid the silver Sound.” Ogilby wrote, “Apollo playd, the Muses heavenly Quire / Alternate parts Sung to his Golden Lyre.”
8. I am grateful not only to Hobbes (who praises the annotations of Ogilby in the preface to his own translation of the Iliad) but to my former research assistant Matthew Spellberg (who located Ogilby’s translation in Houghton Library) for bringing me into contact with these rich annotations.
9. See also the translations of Robert Fitzgerald and A. T. Murray.
10. Victor Erlich, “Eclogue,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965, 1990), 212–13. Most strongly associated with Virgil, the eclogue later flourished in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.
11. Urban T. Holmes, “Poetic Contests,” in Princeton Encyclopedia, 626–27. Holmes’s article names the multiple forms of debate poetry I cite here.
12. Holmes on “Poetic Contests” and Frank Chambers on “Partimen,” in Princeton Encyclopedia, 626–27, 603, respectively.
13. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 86n7.
14. Lawrence J. Zillman, “Sonnet” and “Volta,” in Princeton Encyclopedia, 781–84, 894, respectively.
15. Holmes on “Poetic Contests,” Anna Balakian on “Lauda,” Chambers on “Pastourelle,” in Princeton Encyclopedia, 626–27, 445, 606, respectively. The lauda and pastourelle both begin in the thirteenth century.
16. John Edwin Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 411–12.
17. Jean Bottéro, “La ‘Tenson’ et La Réflexion sur Les Choses en Mésopotamie,” in Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East: Form and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literature, ed. G. J. Reinink and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Department Orientalistiek, UitgeverijPeeters, 1991), 15.
18. Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, “Lore, Learning and Levity in the Sumerian Disputations: A Matter of Form, or Substance?,” in Dispute Poems, 22–23. The cadences of dispute often sound echoic of those we know from Western poetry. In the Iliad, Agamemnon says to Achilles in Robert Fagles translation: “Desert, by all means—if the spirit drives you home! / I will never beg you to stay, not on my account / … What if you are a great soldier? That’s just a gift of god. / Go home with your ships and comrades, lord it over your Myrmidons! You are nothing to me—you and your overweening anger!” (Book I, 204–13). So in “Plough vs. Hoe,” the Hoe says: “Plough, you may trace furrows— / what is your furrowing to me? / Plough, you may cut furrows— / what is your cutting to me?”
19. Vanstiphout, “Lore, Learning,” 25.
20. Thomas L. Reed Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 144–48, 327–28. Even in disputes between the Body and the Soul, the Body gives a strong self-defense. “Joining in the flyting and … reviling the Soul for its moral irresponsibility” (157).
21. Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry, 103–104. Another reminder that dispute is not limited to the West is the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, written at the time of Beowulf. It is laden with poetry contests, drawing contests, and perfume-making contests in addition to disputes between characters.
22. Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry, 392, 394, 398, 401, 408.
23. Ibid., 186.
24. Ibid., 43–65.
25. Ibid., 69–70.
26. Ibid., 88–96.
27. Is it the case that dispute poems precede and help to bring into being these three arenas (as literacy, book publishing, and the novel precede the Humanitarian Revolution)? Reed’s book is more interested in showing how the university, the law courts, and the parliaments helped to shape poetry—the roll call vote in Westminster imported into Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (and see 59, 63, 65, 67, 75, 85, 87–89)—than in showing how poetry shaped these institutions, as when a fourteenth century parliamentary speaker accused the assembly under Edward II of chattering and chirping in a way that calls to mind The Owl and the Nightingale (73, 76). Reed acknowledges that his poetic and institutional materials are contemporary with one another, with some of the institutional developments occurring later (42). And if we recall our starting place—the debate in Homer’s muses—it will remind us that dispute poetry has a long head start. Reed himself often directs attention to the long history of Western and Eastern precedents.
28. Walter Pater, “Conclusion,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), originally published in 1868; quoted and discussed by Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 22.
29. The next three paragraphs provide a summary of arguments I make more fully in On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–5, 86, 93–116.
30. I am mainly speaking here about the aftermath of reading, but this lateralness is recognizable within the act of reading itself, as when one lets a character’s worries take up the mental space usually reserved for one’s own worries (here the work of beauty coincides with the work of empathy), or when one lends Proust one’s mind for several weeks so he can create whatever pictures there he wishes, or when as a literary critic one makes oneself subordinate to the artist—John Keats—about whom one is writing.
31. Bernadette A. Meyler, “Daniel Defoe and the Written Constitution,” Cornell Law Review 94 (2008): 73.
32. J. R. Maddicott, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), vii, 3–7, 10, 16, 25, 26, 29, 31.
33. Sarah Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 95–96, 358, and see the chapter, “Æthelstan Patron of Poets,” 101ff., esp. 106–108. Scholarly essays collected in Colin Chase’s The Dating of Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981) present the rival arguments for the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The case for Æthelstan is given by R. I. Page (113–22), E. G. Stanley (200–1), and Colin Chase citing Robert L. Reynolds, Norman Blake, and Nicolas Jacobs (7).
34. Foot, Æthelstan, 12.
35. This is why the State in Orwell’s 1984 is not only intent on destroying facts, but gives equal priority to destroying fiction. Fiction nourishes the ongoing exercise of counterfactual thinking without which there cannot be thinking. I have argued this more fully in “A Defense of Poesy (The Treatise of Julia),” in On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, ed. Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 13–28.
THE ETHICS OF READING
1. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
2. I have discussed the matter in more detail in “Interpretation und Gespräch. Reflexionen zu Gadamers Wahrheit und Methode,” in Poetica 43 (2011): 177–203.
3. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965). I criticize some of Hirsch’s formulations in the essay cited in note 3.
4. Karl Kraus, “Die Sprache,” in Magie der Sprache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982): 344. “Einer geistigen Disziplin, die gegenüber dem einzigen, was ungestraft verletzt werden kann, der Sprache, das höchste Maß einer Verantwortung festsetzt und wie keine andere geeignet ist, den Respekt vor jeglichem andern Lebensgut zu lehren.”
JONATHAN CULLER
1. Wayne Booth, “Epilogue: The Ethics of Reading,” in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 489.
2. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1981): 133–34.
3. Geoffrey G. Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 142–3.
4. Jean-François Lyotard, Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
5. Wayne Booth, Literary Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979): 243.
6. G. K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton XV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989): 213.
DISCUSSION SESSION 1: THE ETHICS OF READING
1. See Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14.3 (2006): 207–236; Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2. George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
THE RAW AND THE HALF-COOKED
1. “A woman raises her arms for products as people loot from a destroyed shop after Tuesday’s Earthquake in Port-au-Prince,” January 16, 2010 (Reuters/Carlos Barria), www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/haiti_six_days_later.html.
2. “A mob of Haitians reach out as goods are thrown from a nearby shop in the downtown business district on January 17, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti” (Chris Hondros/Getty Images), www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/haiti_six_days_later.html.
3. “Looters throw a box with goods taken from a destroyed store in Port-au-Prince,” January 18, 2010 (Reuters/Carlos Barria).
4. Over the last decade, the movement Personhood USA has tried to amend various state constitutions so that full personhood would be extended “to every human being at any stage of development.” In 2011, Congressman Paul Ryan [R-Wisconsin] sponsored a bill to amend the U.S. Constitution to include a clause that would read, “[T]he life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” Sanctity of Human Life Act, H.R. 212 (112th Congress, 2011–2012) and H.R. 23 (113th Congress 2013).
5. The platform stated, “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Republican Platform 2012, 14; www.gop.com/2012-republican-platform_we.
6. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), held that corporations’ expenditure of company funds for electioneering was a form of free speech and thus protected under the First Amendment. See also Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), holding that individuals’ expenditures of money constitutes protected political speech.
7. Dalina Castellanos, “Geraldo Rivera: Hoodie Responsible for Trayvon Martin’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2012.
8. Elizabeth Flock, “Geraldo Rivera Hoodie Comments Spark Prominent People to Wear Hoodies,” Washington Post, March 27, 2012.
9. “To do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.…” (Micah 6:8); Lisa Miller, “Trayvon Martin: Doing Justice, Having Faith in Social Media,” Washington Post, March 29, 2012. See also Rosalind Helderman, “Rep. Bobby Rush Chided for Wearing Hoodie on House Floor for Trayvon Martin,” Washington Post, March 28, 2012.
10. “During the session of the House, a Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner may not wear a hat or remain by the Clerk’s desk during the call of the roll or the counting of ballots.… The Sergeant-at-Arms is charged with the strict enforcement of this clause.”
11. Peter Grier, “Why Couldn’t Rep. Bobby Rush Wear Hoodie on House Floor?” Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2012.
12. M. Norton and S. S0mmers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (2011): 215–218.
13. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 3.
CONQUERING THE OBSTACLES TO KINGDOM AND FATE: THE ETHICS OF READING AND THE UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR
1. See description of elenchus at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/.
2. See Matthew 22:15–22; Mark 12:13–17; Luke 20:19–26.
WILLIAM GERMANO
1. Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 10.
DISCUSSION SESSION 2: THE ETHICS OF READING AND THE PROFESSIONS
1. Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’ ” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 191–220.
2. United States Department of Justice, Memorandum for John Rizzo, “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative,” August 1, 2002, 14; http://documents.nytimes.com/justice-department-memos-on-interrogation-techniques.
THE CALL OF ANOTHER’S WORDS
1. Frank Bird Linderman, American: The Life Story of a Great Indian, Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows (New York: John Day, 1930).
2. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
RESPONSES AND DISCUSSION
1. Serguei Alex Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” Public Culture 13, no. 2 (2001): 191–214.
2. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk, trans. Cecil Parrott (London: Penguin, 1974).
3. Ibid., 18.
4. Ibid., 19, phrase translated in original (19n1).
5. See, e.g. Megan R. Martin, “The Growth of Czech Feminism through Resistance Activities from 1968 to 1993,” Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 26, no 1 (Spring 2009): 7–13.
6. István Őrkény, Egyperces novella (Hungary 1967); translated here by Kim Lane Scheppele.
DIDIER FASSIN
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Penguin, 1902/1994), 72.
DISCUSSION SESSION 3: THE HUMANITIES AND HUMAN RIGHTS
1. Kevin O’Flynn, “Toys Cannot Hold Protest Because They Are Not Citizens of Russia, Officials Rule,” The Guardian, February 15, 2012.
2. Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 198–99; originally published as “Morale du joujou,” Monde Littéraire, April 17, 1853.
3. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
1. Mark Payne, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
2. Conversation between Daniel Callahan (co-founder of Hastings Center) and Elaine Scarry, Hasting Center, Garrison, New York, December 6, 1980. See also Bernard Rosen and Arthur Caplan, Ethics in the Undergraduate Curriculum (New York: Hastings Center, 1980); Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok, Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (New York: Hasting Center, 1980); Charles Radey, “Telling Stories: Creative Literature and Ethics,” Hastings Center Report 20, no. 6 (November–December 1990), 25.
3. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
4. Christian Thorne, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009).