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all this should not detract us from recognizing at the same time some
of the important results that were connected with this development.
The internalization of the modernist movement-that is, the inclusion
of the great works of modern art and thought-within the humanities
in the university, however belated and inadequate the process may
have been, led to a general re-interpretation and re-eval uation of parts
of the past; the example I provided at the opening of these notes is
only one out of many instances. Great works of art from the past
persist because of their ability
to
generate new meanings among suc–
cessive groups of readers or spectators in time. In history new per–
spectives keep occurring; these are turned upon the great works from
the past, and new or other meanings appear in the same objects. The
effect of turning the modern onto the past was to bring the past back
to life in a new way. However tardy and insufficient the concerted
activity might have been, real benefits accrued within the humanities
and within the university at large-which also began
to
include within
itself fugitives and refugees from the worlds of the avant-garde, the
modern, and the bohemian, its erstwhile enemies and
betes noires.
It
even included
Partisan Review.
Yet if we step back and from the perspective of the present look
at what the humanities today are doing and what they are like, things
do not appear to have followed the generally improved and pleasant
path that might be logically inferred from the foregoing remarks. For
other forces both within the university and without also were at work.
The picture in the humanities today is very different from what it
might have appeared to be twenty years ago. For example, if we think
of research and of teaching and of the relation or disrelation of the
two and of the relation of both to the conception that humanists have
of themselves, certain observations may be advanced . In the
humanities, as in other scholarly areas, the exponential growth of
knowledge has led once again to the increasing groWth of specializa–
tion, to intense specialization. It is a truism that scholars today tend to
know more and more about less and less. Yet this particular narrow–
ness bears with peculiar acuteness upon the humanities in which it
tends to be true that important problems, involving real issues and
real people, can rarely, if ever, be solved within the boundary lines by
which the academic study of human affairs is professionally frag–
mented. Moreover, it is especially important that the humanities de-
