The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today - Paperback

$46.15
$46.15
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The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
  • The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today - Paperback

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today - Paperback

by Eric Adler
$46.15
$46.15

Book Overview

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition.

Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.
ISBN9780197680810
Author Eric Adler
PublisherOxford University Press
GenreEducation, Literature, and History
FormatPaperback
PublishedDecember 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages272
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Education History Literary Collections Nonfiction

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More by Eric Adler

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today - Paperback

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today - Paperback

By Eric Adler

About Eric Adler

Eric Adler is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond and Valorizing the Barbarians: Enemy Speeches in Roman Historiography.

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