Response to first blog post

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses to the Introduction and Preface of The New Humanities Reader. It was really enlightening to read about your previous experiences relative to the expectations for this course. We’ll have more of a chance to see how concepts like “shared horizons” play out when we begin discussing the essays themselves. A number of you, including Samantha and Gaurav, drew attention to the fact that this textbook emphasizes the need to make connections between what’s done in the classroom and what’s happening in the world. Something worth emphasizing in that regard is the fact that, according to Miller and Spellmeyer, “the present is actually at least as opaque and baffling as the past” (xvi). In other words, before we can go about giving recommendations about what needs to be done to improve the world, we need to begin with a clear understanding of what issues are at stake, and in what ways these issues are intertwined.

I also noted that the divide between classroom and the world is not the only divide Miller and Spellmeyer identify: many of you also discussed the divide between sciences and the humanities. Students like Hilary and Emily took up the question of what makes the humanities a distinct field of inquiry, suggesting that the humanities require a different kind of thought that does not solely depend on specialization, but that also leverages breadth of knowledge. Since so many of you are science majors, I’m sure that the relationship between science and the humanities is a topic we will return to throughout the semester. I liked Brian’s mention of the fact that humanistic study can inform our approaches to science, however. This seems especially true when, as Darren notes, we approach writing as a means of creating new knowledge rather than reporting what we already know; writing becomes both a mode of hypothesis and a mode of experimentation, if you will.

A number of you also focused your responses on the ways in which the expectations for this course differ from the “5 paragraph essay.” I appreciated Jaehee’s mention of the fact that this mode of writing asks you to become comfortable with uncertainty, as Miller and Spellmeyer say (xxxiii). While it’s true that the Expos essay is far less formulaic than other forms of writing you may have learned, we can still take a systematic approach to this process that ensures both that your ideas are rich and interesting and that they are comprehensible to your reader. The most important thing to remember is that you should make this subject matter interesting to you by investigating aspects of these texts that puzzle or intrigue you. That’s a good way to ensure that your audience will also enjoy what you write!