https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6886-7530
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ABSTRACT
Departments of Arts and Humanities globally face increasing financial threat from falling enrolment, rising costs, and ‘strategic realignment’ at university level. In the UK, in particular, cuts to the Arts and Humanities sector are becoming endemic, with complex ramifications for prospective students as well as academic and professional staff. In light of these structural and ideological challenges, this paper proposes a revisiting of the philosophical work of Richard Rorty. Rorty has argued compellingly for the morally educative importance of the arts as well as the distinct gift of a liberal education more generally. Ultimately, however, we argue that Rorty’s liberal ideals are radically threatened in the present context of neoliberalism and that they have been particularly problematised in philosophical and literary work since Rorty’s death in 2007. The theoretical writings of Lauren Berlant as well as the literary fiction of Nicole Flattery and Natasha Brown are our key exemplars here. Through our analysis of these texts, we interrogate what we might desire of education beyond the liberal paradigm underpinning Rorty’s thought; and we sketch a framework for the Arts and Humanities perhaps more responsive to the crises of our contemporary age.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Arts and humanities cuts ‘endemic’, warns UCU | Times Higher Education (THE).
3. UCU - Birkbeck University threatens to sack 140 staff.
4. Muslihah Albakri, Pete Dangerfield and Kathryn Gallop, Department for Education, Attitudes to Education: the British Social Attitudes survey 2018 (2020), 19.
5. Department for Business Innovation & Skills, “The effect of Higher Education on graduates’ attitudes: Secondary Analysis of the British Social Attitudes Survey, BIS Research Paper No. 200 (2015), 8.
6. In which an ageing man falls in love with a young woman who is played by two women (in much the same way as Natasha and Lucy become doubles for Carr). The film portrays a quixotic version of heterosexual love in which the female body is submitted to male brutalisation and seen as an impenetrable object for individual men as it is sexualised by society in general.
7. Characterised by obsession with an enigma of a real but undeveloped woman.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Orlaith Darling
Orlaith Darling is completing her PhD at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Her project, which is funded by the Irish Research Council, examines discourses of neoliberalism in contemporary fiction. She has published widely on contemporary culture for journals such as Popular Music and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Critique, and Irish Studies Review, and with Routledge, among others. She is the co-founder of the Contemporary Irish Literature research network, and is a graduate fellow in Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
Áine Mahon
Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University College Dublin. Her primary research areas are Philosophy of Education and Philosophy of Literature. Áine’s first monograph, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. With Andrew Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, she has co-edited Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); and with Clara Fischer of Queen’s University Belfast, she has co-edited Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). Her latest book, The Promise of the University: Reclaiming Humanity, Humility, and Hope was published by Springer in 2021.