“Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.”
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In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
