Introductory NHR Assignment

The New Humanities takes an awkward stance when it comes to reading and writing. To successfully read and write, the New Humanities ask the students to “think for yourself, and do so while you read and write about some of the most important issues of our time” rather than tell the students “how or what to think” (Miller xxi). However, in a sense the New Humanities is telling us how and what to think. Following the introductory paragraph, the New Humanities proceeds to outline the ideas this book intends to teach, from prospective and retrospective reading/writing to the concept of a shared horizon. To tell the students that there are methods of properly reading/writing is to tell the students “how” to think. Regarding “what” to think, the New Humanities seems to have a strong preference for articles about contemporary issues. Clearly not everything can be fit into one book; however, the New Humanities stated it intentionally excluded “traditional humanities: poems and plays, photographs of paintings and statues” (xxii).

Perhaps this apparent contradiction might be intentional. Perhaps this is the first lesson of prospective and retrospective writing the book wants to teach. The liberating and open attitude the New Humanities brings only acts as a facade for the didacticism that plagues all literary texts - and that might be fine. Everything doesn’t have to make perfect sense or have perfect logic as while one way of viewing a matter, whether it be the articles or lesson taught in this book, might not be right, it certainly does not have to be wrong either. Continually finding contradictions in your own view and others’ views, synthesizing those ideas together and striving to find a “shared horizon” where everything connects is perhaps the true intention of what it means to “think for yourself”.