Fuller, Steve. "Who Needs the Humanities?" PROJECT SYNDICATE (2008).

Nowadays, in country after country, policymakers have become obsessed with the need to strengthen science education. But what about the humanities – all those disciplines (literature, history, languages, and so forth) whose relevance to economic competitiveness is not so obvious? We need the humanities only if we are committed to the idea of humanity. If the humanities have become obsolete, then it may be that humanity is losing its salience. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/fuller6/English.

McClay, Wilfred. "The Burden of the Humanities." WILSON QUARTERLY (2008).

What does it mean to speak of the “burden” of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the ­near ­opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our ­duty. Both of these senses of ­burden—­the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as ­task—­need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life ­possible. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=452772&forumaction=forums.threads.

Krystal, Arthur. "Age of Reason [on Jacques Barzun]." NEW YORKER October 22, 2007.

. . . At the Colloquium, books and ideas were thrown open to discussion; almost every approach was tolerated. “Cultural criticism” was Barzun and Trilling’s coinage for their lack of method, and it worked so well that, in the mid-fifties, Fred Friendly, an executive producer at CBS News, tried (and failed) to persuade the two men to offer a version of the Colloquium for television. “It was awe-inspiring,” the historian Fritz Stern, a 1946 alumnus of the Colloquium, recalled recently. “There I was, listening to two men very different, yet brilliantly attuned to each other, spinning and refining their thoughts in front of us. And when they spoke about Wordsworth, or Balzac, or Burke, it was as if they’d known him. I couldn’t imagine a better way to read the great masterpieces of modern European thought.” The class met on Wednesday evenings, and, as the decades passed and more specialized approaches to literature emerged, Barzun and Trilling remained committed to the essential messiness of culture. Neither the self-isolating pieties of the New Critics, nor the technical proficiency of the Russian Formalists, nor the class-bound shibboleths of Marxist writers held sway in their classroom. As a result, they were condemned, as Barzun recalled, “for overlooking the autonomy of the work of art and its inherent indifference to meaning; for ignoring the dialectic of history,” not to mention “the ‘rigorous’ critical methods recently opened to those who could count metaphors, analyze themes, and trace myths.” Basically, Barzun and Trilling cast themselves in the Arnoldian mold of relating culture to conduct. Matthew Arnold believed that judging books “as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture” would help realize man’s better nature and, thus, eventually improve society itself. Trilling and Barzun were less dreamy about the critic’s power, but, like Arnold, they saw no fissure between moral and aesthetic intelligence. They interpreted books liberally and wrote about them with a fluency and a precision befitting R. P. Blackmur’s definition of criticism as “the formal discourse of an amateur.” For all that, Barzun was never a 'New York intellectual.' He occasionally fraternized with the Partisan Review crowd, but he avoided the sectarian wars that seemed to fuel their lives and work; he appears only marginally in most accounts of the literary figures who rotated around the magazine. Yet, when a mid-century issue of Time came out with a lead article entitled “America and the Intellectual,” it wasn’t Edmund Wilson, or Lionel Trilling, or Sidney Hook, or Mark Van Doren whose likeness appeared on the cover (though all were mentioned inside); it was that of a man who hadn’t even been born here. . . . Read the entire article here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal?currentPage=all.

Hart, Jeffrey. "Jacques Barzun at 100." NEW CRITERION November 2007.

Barzun became one of those unusual teachers and writers who is part of a permanent conversation in my mind, and certainly in the widely disparate minds of many others. I did not actually meet Barzun until 1957, when, after almost four years in Naval Intelligence during the Korean War, I returned to Columbia as a graduate student and assistant professor. At that time Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling were teaching their famous graduate seminar on major works in the development of the modern mind. Admission to the Barzun-Trilling seminar, as it was known, entailed an interview with the two professors, which took place in Trilling’s Hamilton Hall office. This turned out to be genial, indeed conducted with a tone that suggested that in some sense we were equals, gentlemen and professionals, and serious about goals the three of us shared. In that first interview I gained a distinct sense that what they wanted were seminar participants who not only would teach but had it in mind to write in a serious way, and to the extent possible be engaged in focused and shaping activity: No Waste Landers; no Bartleby the Scriveners; no William Steig figures curled up in protective boxes of sensibility. The course met once a week in the evening. Each week, the two-hour session began with the consideration of an essay written by a member of the class. Clean copies had been put on reserve for the class to read. At the seminar the author received his own work back with written comments by Trilling and Barzun. Then the group discussed the essay. The pretensions of my first essay were annihilated, especially by Barzun. One result was that, as I rose from the dead, he was able to praise my second effort as publishable. There can be no doubt that other students found the intense criticism of Barzun and Trilling invaluable to their writing. After spending at least half an hour on such essays, we moved on to the discussion of a major work. These included Mill on Bentham and Coleridge with an introductory essay by F. R. Leavis, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, Chesterton’s Victorian Age in Literature, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Bagehot’s English Constitution, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, essays by John Jay Chapman, whom Barzun very much admired, and, because a subject of wide interest at the time, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Barzun and Trilling provided a useful contrast, Barzun clarifying, usually trying to cut to the indispensable core of a major thinker’s work, explicating, achieving an understanding, Trilling often pushing back at the text, viewing it as a locus of problematical energy. He was engaged to the point of feeling challenged and required to respond. He often said in one way or another, “It’s complicated, very complicated.” Certainly, it would be too much to say that Barzun and Trilling were Settembrini and Naptha up there in that sanitarium on their magic mountain, or Cassirer and Heidegger in their internationally famous 1929 debate at Davos in the Alps, but the paradigms do have relevance; Barzun, though romantic in his sympathy for particular energies of art, was also in his analytical approach what could be called a rationalist, or, as Sidney Hook once remarked, as possessing “luminous common sense.” His clarifications of Trilling’s complexities sometimes were essential. . . . Read the whole article here: http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/26/11/jacques-barzun-at-100/.