About the Book
Distinguished scholar Mikhail Epstein offers a re-assessment of the role of the humanities and advocates their constructive potential for the society and intellectual culture of the future.
In his famous classification of the sciences, Francis Bacon not only catalogued those branches of knowledge that already existed in his time, but also anticipated the new disciplines he believed would emerge in the future: the "desirable sciences." In this open access publication, Mikhail Epstein echoes, in part, Bacon's vision and outlines the "desirable" disciplines and methodologies that may emerge in the humanities in response to the new realities of the twenty-first century. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should they have some active, constructive supplement? We know that technology serves as the practical extension of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively.
The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto addresses the question: Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to the transformative status of technology and politics? It argues that we need a practical branch of the humanities which functions similarly to technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Foreword, by Caryl Emerson (Princeton University)
Introduction
Part One. An Open Future
Chapter 1. From Post- to Proto-: Toward a New Prefix in Cultural Vocabulary
Chapter 2. Chronocide: A Prologue to the Resurrection of Time
Chapter 3. Mikhail Bakhtin and the Future of the Humanities
Part Two. Humans and Texts
Chapter 4. Reconfigurations of Textuality
Chapter 5. " ". Ecophilogy: Text and its Environment
Chapter 6. Semiurgy: From Language Analysis to Language Synthesis
Chapter 7. Scriptorics: An Introduction to the Anthropology and Personology of Writing
Part Three. Humans and Machines
Chapter 8. The Fate of the Human in the Posthuman Age
Chapter 9. The Art of World-Making and the New Vocation for Metaphysics
Chapter 10. Information Trauma and the Evolution of the Human Species
Chapter 11. Horrology: The Study of Civilization in Fear of Itself
Part Four. Humans and Humans
Chapter 12. Universics: From Relativism to Critical Universality
Chapter 13. Micronics: The Study of Small Things
Chapter 14. From Body to Self: What Is It Like To Be What You Are?
Chapter 15. Differential Ethics: From the Golden Rule to the Diamond Rule
Part Five. The Future of Wisdom. Creative Theory
Chapter 16. What Is 'The Interesting?'
Chapter 17. Philosophy's Return to Wisdom
Chapter 18. Logos and Sophia: Sophian Disciplines
Chapter 19. The Philosophy of the Possible and the Possibilities of Philosophy
Chapter 20. The Mass of Knowledge and the Energy of Thinking In Place of a Conclusion: A New Introduction to Future Thinking
Glossary
References
Index
About the Author :
Mikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 20 books and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991); The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions (London); the International Essay Contest set up by Lettre International and Weimar - Cultural City of Europe, 1999; and The Liberty Prize, awarded annually for "the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations" (New York, 2000).
Editor and Translator: IIgor E. Klyukanov is Professor of Communication Studies at Eastern Washington University. He has authored more than 100 articles, book chapters and books in communication theory, semiotics, translation studies, general linguistics, and intercultural communication. His works have been published in U.S., Russia, England, Spain, Costa Rica, Serbia, Bulgaria, India and Morocco. He served as an associate editor of The American Journal of Semiotics and is the founding editor of the Russian Journal of Communication.
Author of Foreword: Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Princeton University, USA.
Review :
Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
Mikhail Epstein's The Transformative Humanities is a critical manifesto for our times. The humanities, denigrated, underfunded, abandoned, and increasingly seen as irrelevant, are here rethought and reordered. Not a claim for a more economically viable or culturally more relevant form of the humanities; not an argument that states we need the humanities to make better citizens or more humane professionals, Epstein looks at the core of the humanities and sees its vitality and strength undiminished beneath layers of disciplinary morbidity and administrative pandering. A book that ALL humanists need to read to understand the problems and the advantages of the humanities in the 21st century.
An unforeseen boon of the 1989-91 revolutions in the Soviet bloc has been the re-invigoration of Western intellectual life. Eastern European thinkers encountered with fresh eyes, and much unease, the theories and attitudes that arose in a Paris-dominated West from the heyday of Sartre to that of Badiou. Among the most significant and startling contributions since '89 have come to us from Mikhail Epstein, who's been setting thought experiments in motion since the time of Perestroika. Emerging from the Soviet bubble to take the measure of postmodernism, the first questions that Epstein posed were: Why post-? Why not proto-? His concern ever since has been to redirect humanists from self-pity toward 'inventorship.' 'Perhaps,' as he writes in The Transformative Humanities, 'twenty-first century society, and conceivably even academe itself, are turning away from the humanities because in the twentieth century, and especially in the second half, the humanities turned away from humans?' The task he has set himself is no less than to invent concepts, reinvent attitudes, and engineer a technics that will render the humanities human at last.
It is widely recognized that we are in the midst of a crisis in how universities are organized, the ends they serve, and the place they hold in national life. The humanities are at the epicenter of changes now taking place. Mikhail Epstein is uniquely qualified to grasp the complex nature of the current dilemma, and more importantly, to provide a blueprint for the future that is both visionary and realistic. He is a thinker/activist who was tried in the crucible of late Soviet social, economic, and institutional chaos. He now brings the skills he developed in that historic moment of change to bear on our own. In an age in which a tsunami of sheer data threatens to overwhelm our capacity to make sense of it, Epstein's revolutionary project demonstrates how wisdom can triumph over brute information. His manifesto is one of the best informed, and most compelling arguments I know for education that is still centered on how to be human.
The Transformative Humanities will be, for many scholars, a jump-start to critical inquiry across literary studies and philosophy alike.
