Anthony Grafton and Bruno Latour may be considered as people of knowledge and education Essay Example For Students

Anthony Grafton and Bruno Latour may be considered as people of knowledge and education Essay Anthony Grafton and Bruno Latour may be considered as people of knowledge and education. They both were engaged in the process of knowledge acquiring and transforming it into their own ideas and new horizons of thought. For most aficionados, Princeton historian Anthony Grafton put the bon mot in play a few years ago in his elegant The Footnote: A Curious History Harvard University Press. Now, however, in The Devils Details: A History of Footnotes Invisible Cities Press, former Amherst College dean Chuck Zerby, in his odd doppelgÃÆ' ¤nger to Graftons volume, merely credits Grafton with reusing the line while stating see backhanded compliment at Zerby footnote No. 31, Grafton indicated that three other scholars have used the quip. That is, before Zerby made it four and your writer made it five. 1 But can we trust Zerby? His initial footnote to Graftons book, on Page 13, gives the publication date as 1999. By Page 55, the date reverts to 1997 the correct year, where it remains in subsequent citations. Is this the Devil teaching Zerby manners, befouling his own Grafton footnote as punishment for the authors daring, as a mere freelancer, to zap our leading footnote-ologist? Another Zerby aside, commenting on a purportedly inadequate Grafton citation Graftons annotation is not as fulsome as one might wish, suggests that less preternatural causes, like carelessness, prompt Zerbys error. But this aggressive proponent of a footrace within the historiography of the footnote does remind us that Graftons own crediting of the remark under whelms. The eminent Renaissance scholar points readers to a 1976 book, Cole Lesleys Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward, in which Coward attributed a stronger version of the remark to John Barrymore. 3 Any chance Barrymore stole it from Edwin Forrest? Grafton begins his search with what prove to be two straw men: the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke and the late-eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, who share the reputation of having perfected modern historical scholarship. Despite Rankes impressive combination of narrative and analytical history and Gibbons blending of massive knowledge and high style, neither, according to Grafton, was the first to practice the art and craft of documented, critical history. Behind both were ancient, medieval, and Renaissance prototypes, numerous historians who not only told stories but cited evidence as well. Among them were the Italians Bernardino Corio, Leonardo Bruni, and Giannantonio Campano; the Englishmen Richard White and Ben Jonson; and, most impressively, the great French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou. The latter wrote a genuinely new kind of history in what would prove to be the longest historical narrative before the twentieth century. 2 Other prototypes of modern scholarship included seventeenth-century church historians and antiquaries, particularly the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, whose massive, illustrated study of ancient China marked the maturation of a tradition of historical documentation reaching all the way back to the fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius and the venerable eighth-century English monk known as Bede. Here, too, one can find a combination of technical argument and deep documentation that anticipates modern historical scholarship. Also helping to make the primary source supreme within this tradition of scholarship were the bitter tracts of warring Protestants and Catholics. The seventeenth century was nonetheless a step up in historical scholarship because that centurys church historians and antiquaries, as well as exceptional scholars like de Thou, subjected documents to a higher degree of scrutiny, allowing the age of primitive accumulation of ecclesiastical-learning . . . to give way to one of analysis and investment. 4 However, Mr. Grafton again insists that the work of these scholars also provides an insufficient explanation for the rise of the footnote. So who, or what, in the end was the key player in the birth of the new professional scholarship the footnote came to represent? For Grafton, that honor belongs to a scholar and a work he first discovered as a college undergraduate: the great Dictionnaire of Pierre Bayle. Swarming with footnotes and irreverencies, and aspiring to expose and correct all the mistakes then existing in other reference books, Bayles dictionary is truly a young mans book. It was written against the background of the deconstruction of the scientific authority of the ancients at the hands of the new seventeenth-century scientists Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, and Robert Boyle. Here the modern rules of scholarly procedure and historical scholarship as we know them today finds their definitive statement. 3 Although Grafton proclaims Bayles uniqueness, he diminishes it somewhat by his extensive honor roll of earlier prototypes and by the revelation that Bayle was not, as the Germans like to say, always sauber he silently abridged and consciously or unconsciously misread texts. So, in the end, the hero of Graftons story turns out to be far from indisputable. If there is a failing in this very ambitious and informative little book, it is the absence of a discussion of what the rise of the footnote or modern scholarship has meant for the reading public outside the academy. Grafton writes about a very comfortable scholarly world that he obviously loves. The only discordant note he finds is arguably one only a scholar in such a position would take notice of and lament: the footnotes stylistic decline to a list of highly abbreviated archival citations. Statistics Project EssayAnd like Searle he knows something about intuitive and irrational reactions based upon thick and multifarious internal processing the mind that is inseparable from our bodily selves. 10 The intuitive, irrational, imaginative, whole human beingà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ another category dismissed by poststructuralistsà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ is the subject of the final and finest essay in the second half of the book, Martha Nussbaums The Literary Imagination in Public Life, a beautiful reading of Hard Times as a lesson in the wisdom that no public servant should be allowed to forget. Unlike any of the other writers, Nussbaum repeatedly uses the word life as the standard of truth and value try finding that word in any poststructuralist text!. Mr. Gradgrinds educational theories are bad because they are false to life; Dickenss novel is good because it offers a vision of life that includes reason and imagination, soul and body. Nussbaum, like Searle, comes from a field outside English: she is a professor of law and philosophy. Unlike the English professors whose essays make up the majority of Beyond Poststructuralism, these two have the courage to say that poststructuralism is wrong and that literature is rooted in life. Too many English professors have been listening so respectfully to such people as Bruno Letour and such theories as computo ergo sum that they have lost their nerve and acquiesced in the refusal of poststructuralism to acknowledge life as a meaningful term of value. Our whole profession should remember Paulinas words in The Winters Tale: Dear life redeems you. Dear life, our biological life on earth, must become the standard of truth if we are to redeem literary studies from post structuralism without relying on blind faith and miracles. Life is certainly a standard of value in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution, edited by Bill Henderson. This collection of essays, cartoons, poems, and snippets from newspapers is breezy and informal. The forty essays are all short, and as far as I can tell, none is by a literary critic. Poets and essayistsà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ Gary Snyder and Wendell Berryà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬ contribute; so do the humorists Russell Baker and Dave Barry and the novelists E. Annie Proulx and John Updike. The book has one clear theme: enslavement to computers is taking us out of the natural world, away from face-to-face and voice-to-voice connections with our friends and our families. Some of the essays also decry the expense of computers, the planned obsolescence that forces people to keep buying upgrades so that they will not be stuck with unusable machines. More clearly than anyone else Wendell Berry warns that computers are one more link between us and the power companies that are destroying the earth for their own profit. Mark Sloukas Rapture and Redemption in the Virtual World is about the mad millennialism of those devotees of computers who proudly announce their imminent freedom from the body. He does not mention Bruno Letour, but Letour is one of their number. Slouka includes horrifying quotations from other famous professors Michael Benedikt, Bruce Mazlish about the promise of freedom from the ballast of materiality, the possibility of being angels, if not God in virtual reality. The recent mass suicide of the Heavens Gate cult of computer programmers demonstrates that what sounds like harmless lunacy in people like Bruno Latour is in fact deadly. When people start believing computo ergo sum, their minds are open to all demons. 8 /p The disdain for the biological world in poststructuralist theory and the disdain for physical labor that is part of the worship of computers cannot be separated. The supercilious contempt that poststructuralists feel for people who still believe a real world exists is only the most extreme and absurd version of the contempt that white-collar workers have felt for blue-collar workers and farmers ever since the Renaissance. Noxious plants with deep roots are very hard to kill; well-intentioned but half-hearted criticism of post structuralism and computers is not going to be enough. We need a deeper criticism of the falsehoods in our culture, a stronger knowledge that the reality of our life on earth must be the test of truth than the books by Goodheart, Harris, and Henderson offer. But this criticism and this knowledge do not depend on some great intellectual breakthrough, some yet undiscovered insight. If we could once again take literature seriously we would not have to look any further than As You Like It and The Winters Tale, where the rich are forced to remember that their life depends on the poor who grow their food, that only fools and tyrants feel contempt for shepherds. If we can truly believe that the selfsame sun that shines upon Bill Gatess court hides not his visage from a cottage in Bangladesh, then dear life can indeed redeem us.