Mission Statement

We would like to rewrite the scholarly essay. The Humanities scholarly paper is perceived by most of the public at large, for whom higher learning and scholarship is a source of anxiety and suspicion, as inaccessibly written, jargon-laden, irrelevant, and trivial. None of these criticisms matter to most Humanities scholars, who, in accordance with their own anxieties and neuroses, simply want to get on with the socially thankless but intellectually rewarding task of solving the particular scholarly issues with which they have confronted themselves.  We want to make certain that the scholarly/artistic essay enterprise continues, even if it does so “by other means.”

Here is some contemporary background for this difference in opinion. What scholars have learned in the decades following World War II is that the “lofty indifference” with which we tend to perceive the public treatment of the scholarly enterprise, and that we think is simply the way that scholars have always viewed the public, in fact existed largely as an enabling narrative of learning, and that it is based on an inattention to the fact that higher learning has always depended on public support of one kind or another. In other words, scholarship has always been historically situated, and we ignore our own situation at our peril. Continue…