The Place of Humanities in University Studies :: essays research papers

The Place of Humanities in University Studies This is NOT an try out - it is a collection of notes which are the foundation of an 800 word comparison of dickens articles regarding the place of humanistic discipline in university studies, and the roles of mass communication.Part 1 (800 words - 30%)You will be given two short readings by the oddment of Week 3 of the Semester. Identify the approach or approaches used in each, and with reference to the features and examples of the identified approaches as presented in Subject materials, justify your answer.Andrew Riemers article, " hit or Fodder?" (The spend Australian, 16-17 November 1996) can be identified as having both Idealist and Leavisite approaches within the text. This is indicated in several passages of the text"My colleagues in the Department of English were irresponsible...They were trivialising the discipline...by allowing undergraduates to sidestep the so-called canonical writers...in favour of some(pr enominal) transient phenomenon or writer of small talent happened to be their modish obsession.""They were reprehensible ... in encouraging their students to impose simple sub-Marxist, sub-feminist templates on hard and mysterious works of literature ... Miltons Eve reduced to a uncorrupted victim of the patriarchy.""Alluring though it might be, we cannot recover intellectual haleness by turning back the clock.""Cannon or Fodder?" (The Weekend Australian, 16-17 November 1996)When looking at the approaches as they are presented in the Subject Materials, adept is able to identify them as clearly being both heroic and Leavisite. Our Subject Book indicates that the Idealistic view of culture has been "conceived in the humanities and in journalism and popular social commentary ... a part of moral, spiritual and aesthetic value which exist largely independent and higher up smart set". Further, this view states Culture was isolated from society - autonomous because it had to be abstracted from one way of life (pre-industrial) and then transmitted and wide to another (allegedly inferior) way of life to save that society.The Leavisite concept of culture is still common and is firmly bound up in the theory of mass society and mass culture.Mass communications are seen to hold a crucial and permit place in mass society, taking over the role of creating and distributing the values and information common to a society.Mass culture, unlike high culture, is unable to come about its time and place and offer any kind of lasting equity to its audiences and, at worst, positively damages them.