The Nature of Literary History

The Significance of the Humanities and Liberal Arts in Higher Education

“…the educational fund of the state of Michigan is to this day known as the Literary Fund, a phrase that points to the time when school and college curricula were thought of in terms of the printed and written word, science getting under the main tent as ‘natural philosophy,’ which in turn was a branch of literary learning we call philosophy 4 …”

“…Eliot’s Wasteland can alert them to the decline and decadence of modern Western society; Ernest Hemingway’s novels offer good examples of how to be graceful under pressure, particularly in the face of loss of faith in the central institutions of Western civilization; Gary Snyder’s poems can manifest to them how the ‘power-vision in solitude’ enables one to possess the innermost pure and divine wisdom in one’s self; 3 Saul Bellow’s novels register the despairing vision of life; Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories may awaken sympathy with the fate of the wandering Jews; and so on. No wonder thatthe educational fund of the state of Michigan is to this day known as the Literary Fund, a phrase that points to the time when school and college curricula were thought of in terms of the printed and written word, science getting under the main tent as ‘natural philosophy,’ which in turn was a branch of literary learning we call philosophy 4 …”