A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 by Paul Keen (review)

Abstract

help us think about these larger intertwined institutional and social issues it is William Morris, making this a most timely and important collection. Crucially for Morris, intellectual specialization must be seen as part and parcel of a capitalist system in which the division of labor reigns supreme, mental labor is privileged over manual labor, and our alienation from our own world and its making is profound—so much so today that students struggle to wrap their minds around the idea that labor could be pleasurable, or utopian ideals worth desiring and collectively working toward. In this light, the wealth of hands-on strategies here would be very much to Morris’s liking. We so rarely talk about the nuts and bolts of teaching and our wildest hopes and dreams when teaching what we love; this collection does that. It begins with Martinek and Miller identifying Morris as a “tonic to the political conditions of Trumpism and neoliberalism” and someone who “should be an integral part of the twenty-first-century classroom” (2). By the time I finished the collection, I could not agree more. Carolyn Lesjak Simon Fraser University