Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely
defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital
and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public
university's purpose is not vocational training, but rather the
cultivation of what Fradenburg calls "artfulness," including the
art of making knowledge. In addition to sustained critical and
creative thinking, the humanities develop the mind's capacities for
real-time improvisational communication and interpretation, without
which we can neither thrive nor survive. Humanist pedagogy and
research use play, experimentation and intersubjective exchange to
foster forms of artfulness critical to the future of our species.
From perception to reality-testing to concept-formation and logic,
the arts and humanities teach us to see, hear and respond more
keenly, and to imagine, or "model," new futures and possibilities.
Innovation of all kinds, technological or artistic, depends on the
enhancement of the skills proper to staying alive. Bringing
together psychoanalysis, neuroscience, animal behavioral research,
biology & evolutionary theory, and premodern literarature (from
Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare), Fradenburg offers a bracing
polemic against the technocrats of higher education and a vibrant
new vision for the humanities as both living art and new life
science. Contrary to recent polemics that simply urge the
humanities to become more scientistic or technology-focused, to
demonstrate their utility or even trophy their uselessness, Staying
Alive does something remarkably different: it argues for the
humanism of a new scientific paradigm based on complexity theory
and holistic and ecological approaches to knowledge-making. It
urges us to take the further step of realizing not only that we can
promote and enhance neuroplastic connectivity and social-emotional
cognition, but also that the humanities have always already been
doing so. "Nature always exceeds itself in its expressivity" -
which is to say that living is itself an art, and artfulness is
necessary for living: for adaptation and innovation, for forging
rich and varied relationships with other minds, bodies and things,
and thus, for thriving - whether in the boardroom or the art
gallery, the biology lab or the recording studio, the alley or the
playground, the book or the dream. Staying Alive contains companion
essays by Donna Beth Ellard (Rice University), Ruth Evans (Saint
Louis University), Eileen A. Joy (BABEL Working Group), Julie
Orlemanski (University of Chicago), Daniel C. Remein (New York
University), and Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston). TABLE
OF CONTENTS Eileen A. Joy: Prelude: Hands Off Our Jouissance: The
Collaborative Risk of a Shared Disorganization // Chapter 1:
Driving Education: A Crash Course // Fugue 1: Julie Orlemanski: An
Army of Lovers // Chapter 2: Living the Liberal Arts: An Argument
for Embodied Learning Communities // Fugue 2: Daniel C. Remein:
Human-Tongued Basilisks // Chapter 3: Breathing with Lacan's
Seminar X: Expression and Emergence // Fugue 3: Ruth Evans: The
Object Breath // Chapter 4: Life's Reach: Territory, Display,
Ekphrasis // Fugue 4: Donna Beth Ellard: Ekphrastic Beowulf:
Defying Death and Staying Alive in the Academy // Coda: Michael D.
Snediker: Fuzzy Thinking
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