![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
With the humanities under attack, this essay suggests the virtue of obstinacy and fortitude in the face of the continual erasure of spaces for study. Drawing from Henry David Thoreau as an exemplar of obstinate thought, I suggest a hermeneutically inflected communicative ethic that responds to the need for the humanities to defend themselves by turning to the material objects of study: books. Obstinacy is defined here not as stubbornness or inflexibility, but as persistence in the face of adverse circumstances through the practices of reading and writing.
Notes
1 Robert N. Watson, “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit,” Chronicle of Higher Education 56, no. 28 (March 26, 2010); Mark Slouka, “Dehumanized,” Harper’s Magazine (September 2009): 32–40; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “The Humanities’ Value,” Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 28 (March 20, 2009); Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” New York Times, January 6, 2008. For book length explorations, see Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
2 Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “On the Dire Necessity of the Useless: Philosophical and Rhetorical Thoughts on Hermeneutics and Education in the Humanities,” in Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Fairfield (London: Continuum, 2011), 91–106.
3 Claire Barliant, “Reach for the Book—It’s a Weapon,” New Yorker, May 1, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/reach-for-the-book--it-is-a-weapon.html.
4 Luka Arsenjuk and Michelle Koerner, “Study, Students, Universities: An Introduction,” Polygraph 21 (2009): 8.
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments (Fall 1881), 15 [59], in Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1973), vol. 5, part 2, pp. 552–553.
7 Seneca, “Letter XVI: On Philosophy, the Guide of Life,” in The Complete Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Ottowa, Canada: Stoici Civitas Press, 2013): 43.
8 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): 422.
9 Ibid., 431.
10 Ibid., 432–33.
11 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14.
12 For example, see Nathan Crick, “Speaking a Word for Nature: Science and Poetry in the Rhetoric of Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecology,” American Communication Journal 10, no. S (2008): 1–22; Phillip Tompkins, “On ‘Paradoxes’ in the Rhetoric of the New England Transcendentalists,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62, no. 1 (1976): 40–48; Paul Erickson, “Henry David Thoreau’s Apotheosis of John Brown: A Study of Nineteenth Century Rhetorical Heroism,” Southern Journal of Communication 61, no. 4 (1996): 302–11; Robert G. Gunderson, “The Oxymoron Strain in American Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 28, no. 2 (1977): 92–5; J. L. Campbell, “‘It Is as if a Green Bough Were Laid across the Page’: Thoreau on Eloquence,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1990): 61–70.
13 Nathan Crick, The Keys of Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017).
14 Stanley Cavell, Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 141–42.
15 In order to emphasize this, I will refer both to the writer at Walden Pond and to Thoreau, as they are both the same and yet somehow different.
16 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 86.
17 Ibid., 126.
18 Ibid., 16.
19 Ibid., 85.
20 Ibid., 152.
21 Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “Words Addressed to Our Condition,” in Hermeneutic Inspirations for Education and Educational Challenges for Hermeneutics, ed. Malgorzata Przanowska and Andrzej Wiercinski, The Pedagogical Quarterly (forthcoming).
22 Thoreau, Walden, 102.
23 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York: Book of the Month Club, 1996), 114.
24 Ramsey, “Words Addressed to Our Condition.”
25 Thoreau, Walden, 103.
26 Ibid., 98.
27 Ibid., 226–27.
28 Ibid., 97.
29 Ibid., 102.
30 Ibid., 3.
31 Ibid., 16.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 4.
34 Ibid., 67.
35 Ibid., 304.
36 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 446.