kriticulture

By Nicholas Dames (A comprehensive take on the crisis in the humanities - rks) Richard Rorty once argued that Western culture needs the novel, in order to force us to imagine lives and destinies different from our own. Perhaps the humanities, in their current plight, need to be novelistic again. Not necessarily in their fictional mode, such as the moribund campus novel genre with its essentially demystifying comedy, but the novelistic ability to marshal narratives and details that give us back some sense of why the humanities exist for individuals — how, to put it bluntly, they still rescue lives. One doesn’t enter the academy to become a disillusioned professional (although that will happen along the way). One doesn’t enter it to equip businesses with flexible analytic intellects (although that will also happen). One enters it, shamefacedly and unhappily, perhaps, but enters it nonetheless, in order to devote oneself to something greater than personal resentments — to...

Shadow over democracy By Rajesh Kumar Sharma In his written statement submitted to the court in the trial of 1922, Gandhi famously stated the following: They do not know [that] a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defense on the other, have emasculated the people . . . . He was referring to the characteristic British method of subjugating the Indians: terrorise them through use of force and, at the same time, weaken them so much that they will not be able to even stand on their feet. Gandhi chose to use a word that might have for some today sexist connotations but that implied the extraction of the nerve that makes a man a man, a human being a human being - the nerve that flashes in the eyes of a woman too when she refuses to be treated like refuse, the nerve of resistance against insults to our sense of self-respect and dignity. In the Gita , Krishna touches the sa...

Shadow over democracy By Rajesh Kumar Sharma As I adjust the keyboard this Sunday morning to write on some recent legislation in Punjab, the flutter of newspapers crashing like blinded bats into the porch prompts me to go out and collect their scattered pages. Glancing over the headlines, the eyes pause over Punjabi Tribune .  ‘Treasury pays Rs 3.14 crores for the treatment of CM’s Wife’ – the headline is blabbering morosely.  Not a week ago the paper had carried the news that the state government had exempted King’s XI from payment of Rs 2 crores worth of taxes. On another page the same day it reported the enactment of the Punjab Civil Services (Rationalisation of Certain Conditions of Services) Act 2011. I visited the state government’s website to see if I could read the text of the Act. I was disappointed. When the Punjab Special Security Group Act 2010 and the Punjab (Prevention of Damage to Public and Private Property) Act 2010 were enacted some months back, I had to ...

This raises several questions. One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that a big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war. Another is, how can we have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income? I know, this is rushing ahead a bit. But remember, the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor; they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology. This raises several questions. One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that a big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war. Another is, how can we have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income? I know, this is rushing ahead a bit. But remember, the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor; they were skilled artisans whose skills had sudden...

Art and nuclear fear Jed Perl March 30, 2011 | 12:00 am Published on The New Republic ( http://www.tnr.com ) I do not need to explain why I’ve been thinking about Pandora’s box. The Greek legend of a beautiful woman the gods send to earth with a box containing unimaginable evils has long been associated with the dangers of nuclear energy, an association difficult to overlook in light of the catastrophe in Japan. But what precisely did Pandora do? It was in hopes of answering this question that I took off the shelf a famous art historical study, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol , by Dora and Erwin Panofsky. And what I discovered in the Panofskys’ densely argued pages, not surprisingly, is that there is no simple answer. People have had wildly different ideas about Pandora. Which is perhaps precisely what the Panofskys set out to demonstrate. Their book, for all its exquisite Old World erudition, may have been composed with a certain urge...