A Time for the Humanities

Opens a battlefront and conversation that is likely to preoccupy the next generation. -- -Tom Cohen * University at Albany * This book provides a fabulous line up of original and thought-provoking writers on a topic of vital importance. As the pressure to conform is being increasingly felt on all sides--even in areas that we could previously assume were immune from it -- the future, indeed the very viability, of the humanities confronts us with urgent questions. This volume eloquently raises those questions, and does them more than justice. -- -Tina Chanter * De Paul University * While arbitrary and dire decisions about our planet are made every day by presidents, generals, bankers and CEOs, those who work in the humanities have a role to play-first, that of caring for words and their nuances, like the difference between futurity and the future, historicity and history, and then, by questioning their applications to current issues. All these vibrant essays, written by some of the finest minds of today's academia, suggest that the spatial closure that transforms the world into a global prison of sameness not only can but must be undone by a rupture ushered in by the heterogeneity of futurity. Such a new future, less a tense or a time-span than a mode of critical examination, still rhymes with new styles of architecture, and still hopes to bring about a much needed change of heart. -- -Jean-Michel Rabate * University of Pennsylvania *