Pluralised Humanities and Learning from the Past

Abstract

“The humanities” is a strange term: grammatically plural, it is nonetheless often spoken of as a singular, a cluster of different disciplines – such as literature, philosophy, and history, that rose from the liberal arts, and that now form units such as faculties and schools in modern universities. In the institutional, disciplinary context the inherent plurality of the humanities is often forgotten, thus, there have been attempts to categorize multiple forms of humanities expertise that resist the traditional disciplinary designations, refocusing humanities work on topics, themes, and outcomes such as “civic humanities” or “blue humanities.” When remembered, the plural nature of the humanities tends to be located in the diversity between disciplines: the links between literature and history, for example, or philosophy and classics. But the plurality of the humanities can, and should, also be understood as multiplicity within disciplines. All of the traditional established disciplines within Western university curricula are methodologically and hermeneutically diverse, and becoming increasingly so as they engage the intellectual and cultural benefits of interdisciplinarity. For example, I increasingly think of my field as “literary humanities” instead of English literature, for the conventional expectations of literary studies – that it works with certain forms of language, especially written texts, as a cultural or artistic production – extends to include a plethora of other disciplinary practices. Literary humanities engage material culture, film and media studies, drama, visual culture studies, philosophies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive studies, and cultural history of virtually every ilk, including the history of science. All of these disciplines participate in addressing questions that lie at the heart of literary analysis: What is the nature of language-based knowledge, or poēsis in the largest sense of the term? And how does that knowledge interact with other forms of knowledge, including the material world, lived experience and other disciplinary practices? Thinking in terms of the literary humanities, and constructing other, more pluralized understandings of the humanities, resists a totalizing idea of the arts, humanities or science and rejects binaries which have often been used polemically. Pluralized humanities create more points of contact to knowledges that lie outside the traditional academic fields of the humanities altogether, such as the sciences and now, the ScienceHumanities: this develops affinities between not just academic disciplines, but cultural categories of knowledge that are deep, real and effective. My question here is: to what extent is this playing with the pluralizing possibilities in the humanities a kind of remembering of what we, culturally, have forgotten about knowledge? This question comes to me frequently, because my home discipline is medieval English literature, and I am often confronted with the idea that my excitement about connecting to other disciplines, especially the sciences, would have been met with a shrug or a puzzled stare, if one of the great medieval encyclopaedists, or even Chaucer, were to materialize in front of me.