The New Humanities Reader presents 32 challenging and important essays from diverse fields that address current global issues. The authors contend that there is a crisis within the humanities today due to specialization within narrow fields of scholarship, resulting in a higher education system that produces students who lack the general cross-disciplinary knowledge needed to better understand today's complex world. The selections encourage students to synthesize and think critically about ideas and research formerly kept apart. This approach challenges readers to resist mimetic thinking and instead creatively connect ideas to help them understand and retain what they read. Through this process of reading, discussing, and writing, students develop the analytical skills necessary to become informed citizens. Focused on today's issues, the selections represent both well-known nonfiction authors and newly published writers and are drawn from such periodicals as The New Yorker and Natural History and from best-selling books including Reading Lolita in Tehran, Fast Food Nation, and Into the Wild. Students will be engaged by reading and rereading, analyzing and working with these selections not simply because they are models of good writing, but because they are also deeply thought-provoking pieces that invite readers to respond.
Author(s): Richard E. Miller, Kurt Spellmeyer
Edition: 2
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 712
City: Boston
Front Cover
Contents
Thematic Contents
Preface
New Humanities for New Times: The Search for Coherence
Knowledge in Depth and Knowledge of the World
Creative Reading: From Explicit to Implicit
Connective Thinking: The Search for a Shared Horizon
Writing to Tell, Writing to See
Developing a Position
The Spirit of the New Humanities
Web Site
Acknowledgments
David Abram
The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry
Lila Abu-Lughod
Honor and Shame
The Education of Girls
Arranged Marriage
Generations
The Dangers of Schooling
Egyptians
Europeans
Piety
A New Order
Karen Armstrong
Does God Have a Future?
Jonathan Boyarin
Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul
Amy Chua
A World on the Edge
Annie Dillard
The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Susan Faludi
The Naked Citadel
Jon Gertner
The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
Malcolm Gladwell
The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime
1
3
4
5
Stephen Jay Gould
What Does the Dreaded "E" Word Mean, Anyway? A Reverie for the Opening of the New Hayden Planetarium
William Greider
Work Rules
Lani Guinier
Second Proms and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule
The Case of the Majority Vote Run-off
Racial Districting
Proportionality
Steven Johnson
The Myth of the Ant Queen
Mary Kaldor
Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control
Netforce: Informal or Privatized Armed Forces
The New American Militarism
Neo-Modern Militarism
Protectionforce: Peacekeeping/Peace-Enforcement
Controlling War?
Jon Krakauer
Selections from Into the Wild
The Alaska Interior
The Stampede Trail
Beth Loffreda
Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder
Azar Nafisi
Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Martha Nussbaum
Women and Cultural Universals
I. A Matter of Survival
II. Anti-Universalist Conversations
III. The Attack on Universalism
Neglect of Historical and Cultural Differences
Neglect of Autonomy
Prejudicial Application
IV. A Conception of the Human Being: The Central Human Capabilities
Central Human Functional Capabilities
V. Capability as Goal
Tim O'Brien
How to Tell a True War Story
Michael Pollan
Playing God in the Garden
Planting
Sprouting
Growing
Flowering
Meeting the Beetles
Harvest
Virginia Postrel
Surface and Substance
Arnold S. Relman And Marcia Angell
America's Other Drug Problem: How the Drug Industry Distorts Medicine and Politics
Drug Costs
R&D Costs: How High Are They Really?
How Innovative Is the Pharmaceutical Industry?
Testing Drugs on People
Marketing: Where the Action Is
What Should Be Done?
Oliver Sacks
The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See
Eric Schlosser
Global Realization
Uncle McDonald
At the Circus
An Empire of Fat
McLibel
Back at the Ranch
James C. Scott
Behind the Official Story
Alexander Stille
The Ganges' Next Life
Gregory Stock
The Enhanced and the Unenhanced
The Enhanced
Humans and Posthumans: Our Evolutionary Future
The Tensions of Living Together
Breeds Apart
A World Aborning
Martha Stout
When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday
Deborah Tannen
The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue
Roots of the Adversarial Approach to Knowledge
Onward, Christian Soldiers
Sharing Time: Early Training in School
Integrating Women in the Classroom Army
Learning by Fighting
Graduate School as Boot Camp
The Culture of Critique: Attack in the Academy
Believing as Thinking
The Socratic Method - Or Is It?
Knowledge as Warring Camps
Question the Basic Assumption
Consensus Through Dissension?
Who Will Be Left to Lead?
The Cost in Human Spirit
Getting Beyond Dualism
Moving from Debate to Dialogue
Edward Tenner
Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead
The Ambiguity of Disaster
The Automobile and Revenge Effects
Conservation of Catastrophe?
Retreating from Intensity
Robert Thurman
Wisdom
Preamble: Selflessness
Problem: Misknowledge and Self-Preoccupation
Practice: Trying to Find Your "I"
Frans de Waal
Selections from The Ape and the Sushi Master
Survival of the Kindest: Of Selfish Genes and Unselfish Dogs
The Spider and the Fly
The Midwife Bat
Depressed Rescue Dogs
Apples and Oranges
Down with Dualism! Two Millennia of Debate About Human Goodness
Westermarck Beats Freud
Bulldog Bites Master
Moral Emotions
The Ke Willow
Acknowledgments
Author and Title Index
Back Cover
