New Literary History

One way of focusing the perennial crisis in the humanities is to think of it as a crisis of rationale, an inability by humanists to articulate what they do in a way that makes clear its distinctiveness and value to the larger culture. This paper attempts to establish the elements of a rationale. The first is the fact that the object of humanistic study is best conceived as a "text," a material and public medium produced in the past and requiring disciplined attention. The second is the premise that humanistic understanding entails a speculative recuperation of a complex, deep, and overdetermined subject, situated in a particular time and place. Third, humanistic understanding requires the reader to engage with the mind of the author in a way that fosters self-understanding, strengthens and enriches our imaginative powers, and gives a distinctive kind of intellectual pleasure.