The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1966-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE LITERARY PUBLIC

By FRANK KERMODE

WHEN A UNIVERSITY reaches the age of one hundred years it is as wise as it will ever be. It has acquired a real knowledge of how knowledge changes. It knows the secrets not only of learning, but of unlearning. Its faculty has experienced the full taste of mortality and at the same time come to understand the nature of its immortality as persona ficta. It is conversant with other immortal persons, with the perpetuity of the exigent young, who nevertheless pass on quadrennially. It is wise, in short, because it has acquired over its century an instinctive understanding of continuity and change.

The hundred years of this university have been unusually copious in the provision of lessons on change. To have been born in the year when the Civil War ended; to have come in with antiseptics; to have as one’s coevals not only Drum Taps but War and Peace, is to have a congenital association with ends and beginnings, with crisis. Did anyone at Lexington consider what it meant to open a university at a time when an Oxford don was writing a post-Euclidian and pre-Freudian book for children? For 1865 is the date of Alice in Wonderland. Did some humanist, weltering in the chaos of a newly opened Admissions office, console himself with the thought that Kentucky had arranged a handsome six-hundredth birthday offering to Dante? I hope so; for there is a sense in which he would not merely have been cheering himself up but speaking the truth. He would have been expressing the same apprehension of essential continuity that has prompted the University, in its unchallengeable wisdom, to celebrate its centennial with, among other deliberations more likely to change the world, a conference on the Humanities, which change only men.

You will observe that I have gone in for some “centurial mysticism,” as Henri Focillon called it; but I can hardly be criticized for doing that by an audience whose coming together expresses a unanimous approval of the same superstition. But of course it is not superstition but simple commonsense to assert, by whatever means, the association of the university with men and works such as those I named. They are great men and great works because universities exist; they survive because universities exist. If Dante walked in Oxford he walked also in Lexington. You will perhaps be remembering Max Beerbohm’s drawing which shows the terrifying poet looking reflectively down upon a pompous proctor and his bulldogs. But though he might have difficulty understanding the administration, he would have none in seeing that what the scholars, senior and junior, were doing or trying to do, was essentially and intimately his business.

I have abandoned Drum Taps and Alice in Wonderland in favor of Dante, and I will explain why. There are two topics I want, on this occasion, to talk about. One of them is our critical duty, broadly conceived, in the humanistic faculties. The other, which has logical priority though

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.