Humanities and the 21st Century

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Humanities and the 21st Century

• Humanities 1301
• Deanne Schlanger and Cynthia Green

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Humanities Defined

• the cumulative artistic and intellectual
  achievements of humanity
• A critical process for understanding and
  communicating these achievements to others
• The creativity embodied in all of us

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Esthetic Pleasure

• One ought, every day at least, to hear a little
  song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and,
  if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable
  words.
• --Goethe

Les Tres Riches Heures September Fr. 15th c.
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Intellectual Stimulation

• To see the World in a Grain of Sand
• And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
• Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
• And Eternity in an hour.
• --William Blake (1757-1827)
• The world is too much with us late and soon,
• Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
• Little we see in Nature that is ours
• We have given our hearts away
• --William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Blakes Ancient of Days - 1794
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A Sense of Time and Place

• Reliving the treasures of human expression
• Re-examining the canon the traditional list
  of great literature
• Understanding the past in order to envision the
  future

Michelangelos Delphyes Sylphide
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Understanding Our Humanity

• Extending our existence through ideas, paintings,
  music, stage, literature
• Intertwine with the lifetimes of others through a
  shared consciousness
• We need to stop thinking about how we can fit
  into the world as it is but how we can transform
  it Gloria Steinem

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Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)I hold that the
perfection of form and beauty is contained in the
sum of all men
Adam and Eve 1507 (Museo Nacional del Prado,
Madrid)
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Humanist one who strives with heart and mind
to be open to lifeLeonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
Mona Lisa 1503-1506 (Musee du Louvre, Paris)
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Contemplating Our MortalityJacques-Louis David
(1748-1825)
Marat Assassinated 1793 (Musees Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique)
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You cannot step twice into the same river
Heraclitus (540 BC)
Purpose and Meaning of Life
Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) The Wheel of
Fortune 1883 (Musee dOrsay)
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Exploring the Depths of the Soul
The Starry Night 1889 (Van Gogh) The Museum of
Modern Art, New York

• What am I in the eyes of most people? A
  nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant
  personsomebody who has no position in society
  and never will have, in short, the lowest of the
  low. All right theneven if that were absolutely
  true, then I should like to show by my work what
  such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his
  heart. --Vincent Van Gogh

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Mans inhumanity to manand the world around him
The fate of the animals 1913 (Kunstmuseum,
Basle) Franz Marc killed at Verdun, France, 1916
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Re-Visioning the World Around Us
Pearblossom Highway 1986 David Hockney (1937-)