Albrecht Classen, Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning and Relevance of Medieval and Modern Literature. Chisinau, Moldova: Eliva Press 2022, 406 pp.

Abstract

Abstract Professor Classen’s electronic book includes eleven essays, published between 2012 and 2022 but not presented in chronological order. The essays appeared in such journals as Literature & Aesthetics, Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. The context in which all the essays were composed is the increasingly disadvantaged position of academic humanities within universities and university curricula. While popular forms of the arts and humanities are generally thriving in America and Europe, the academic study of the humanities has lost favor with the general public as well as with many university administrators, who, increasingly wedded to data-driven decision processes, are inclined to fund faculty positions based solely on quantitative measures (such as number of majors) as opposed to philosophical or discursive arguments. As more and more students (and parents) seek areas of study promising training for specific post-graduation jobs, especially those tied to fields that seek to increase humankind’s power rather than those that explore humanistic meaning, majors such as biology, engineering, and health sciences experience robust growth, while departments of literature, history, languages, and philosophy languish for want of majors. Thus, we witness the disheartening plight of humanities departments just to replace retiring faculty, let alone grow.