COASTLINE JOURNAL

A Canadian philosopher has been awarded the 2009 Holberg Prize by the Norwegian parliament, worth $750,000, for his interdisciplinary writing. Ian Hacking, 73, describes himself in the Globe and Mail article (link) as a “dilettante” with an insatiable curiousity. Among his books (links to Amazon.ca):

An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic

Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses

The Taming of Chance

The Social Construction of What?

Historical Ontology

A quick search in JSTOR turns up an impressive and variegated list which I have included at the end of this editorial (use of JSTOR documents including citations is subject to their terms and conditions).

As I wrote in the comments section underneath the news story, this underscores the importance of promoting (i.e. funding and alumni support)  interdisciplinary Liberal Arts programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Specialization is inevitable in graduate work if one is to carve out a career; even with a MALS degree we must focus on an area to investigate, but even as we dig deep into whatever interests us we remain aware of the fields around the object of our curiousity, and in our best work we dig both deeply and broadly (although I don’t much care for the image that brings to mind of an open pit “investigation”).

Hacking is an infrequent contributor to the London Review of Books; many of his reviews are available only to subscribers, but I found a few which are free:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n24/hack01_.html (organ transplants)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n16/hack01_.html (neuroscience)

Dr. Ian Hacking

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By Michael Cox

One of my favourite books of all time, which also happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, has been thoroughly downgraded, one might even say trashed, by an article in the New Yorker.  The novel, Malcolm Gladwell writes in the August 10 issue, teaches us that there is one law for blacks–and white trash–and another for good old folks, the decent white folks of Maycomb, Alabama.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as his daughter Jean Louis "Scout" Finch.

At the conclusion of the book, Bob  Ewell, who has been embarrassed by Atticus in court (and accused of attacking his daughter), attacks Scout and her brother. The reclusive next-door neighbour Boo Radley comes to their defence and accidentally kills Ewell. But the sheriff convinces Atticus that it is in everyone’s best interest to say Ewell fell on his knife, saving Boo a trial and possible jail time. “Can you possibly understand?” Atticus asks Scout, after explaining to her that she must tell everyone who asks, that Ewell fell on his knife, and not that Boo stabbed him when he came to the children’s rescue.

“His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites…and another for white trash,” Gladwell writes. “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb Alabama.” (more…)

by Shelly Nixon, University of North Carolina at Asheville

download this essay: Personifying Tragedy

The power of the artist [is] to find and illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos, and to produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity.  Arnold Rampersad

According to Muriel Rukeyser in her book The Life of Poetry, poetry itself is often described in an angry, degrading way.  “The angry things that have been said about our poetry have also been said about our time.  They are both ‘confused,’ ‘chaotic,’ ‘violent,’ ‘obscure’” (1996, 11).  Indeed she meant this not only about the art of poetry itself, but also about the time in which she was writing.  However, if poetry is art, and thus poets are artists, then these criticisms are in direct contrast with Rampersad’s view that artist’s job is to “produce art as a bulwark against the will to inhumanity,” and to “illuminate the profoundly human in the midst of chaos.”  No two collections of poetry illustrate this concept better than Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher.  Indeed in both of these works, that which is profoundly human plays a central role in the midst of chaotic, inhumane circumstances.

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Voigt’s Kyrie is set during the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, and opens with a quotation from Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918: “Nothing else – no infection, no war, no famine – has ever killed so many in as short a period.”  Arguably, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 was a largely impersonal and chaotic episode in U.S. history, involving vast numbers of the American public.  As such, it is difficult to completely comprehend the deeply personal effects of the loss of life.  Voigt, however, brilliantly draws the reader directly into the lives of people experiencing this chaotic and terrifying time period. (more…)