I definitely need to start cultivating some nurturing friendships, though.

Love your blog, by the way. Some great writing here.

All the best,
Dennis Cahlo
http://www.madetomeasureny.com

And finally, I encourage you quite heartily to have a party at your house very soon! Because I Miss You Guys!

PhD Mamas blogged about rewards a short while ago, and I’ve always seen my social events as rewards. In other words, I’ll accept an invitation for something if I know that I’ve done the amount of work I set out to do at the beginning of the week.

Or I’ll decide to host a party, but only if I can meet a particular goal by party date. I know, I know, it’s a little pathetic that my reward is to host a party (which as we all know actually involves more work!) But it gives me something to look forward to, and motivation to hit my goals before it takes place.

I admit this has sometimes meant that my party prep has by necessity sometimes been scrimped on, but then again, my attitude to parties has always been more “gathering” than “showcasing”. So they’ve always been pretty casual. Food and drink and a quick once over of the house it usually all I can manage!

I’m now thinking of the last party I attended at your place. I think it was one of those joint kids/adult Halloween parties! Those were fun. But then again, we had a lot of help from the girls in organizing them!

I am looking at it for my work on the dissertation (oh, and I am a SAHD!!). But with out budget it is a bit pricey.

thanks.

If I reach my diss output goal this week (it is a hefty one, but I am determined), I am buying myself this:
http://www.jcrew.com/AST/Browse/WomenBrowse/Women_Shop_By_Category/jacketsouterwear/jacketsouterwear/PRDOVR~13105/13105.jsp

You like?
-Amy

Frankly, many of our business practices and some of our technologies (if not most) have a profound effect on our humanity. I don’t see the study of the humanities as a separate field from business or technology – I think we should be thinking about the humanities within those contexts.

I’ve had a similar conversation with other Amy about cultural studies, but I think the push in humanities to return to our “mission” of scholarship about what makes us human (and in literature to “just literature”) is a two-edged sword. I see that it is easy for the humanities to get swallowed up by other disciplines whenever it undertakes interdisciplinary work, whether that’s with cultural studies, science and technology, or business.

At the same time, our cultural relevance to that larger culture that Amy’s mother is speaking for, or that Obama is targeting when talking about jobs in technology and business is almost non-existent. When we retreat from interdisciplinary work, we remove ourselves a little further from the experience of the public.

I’ve been thinking about why it is that those outside of humanities cannot see its value as a discipline that has something to say about our human condition, and I think that’s because we don’t do a good job of making ourselves relevant. Just as we need to sell composition students on the importance of writing well to their lives (or other realms of study to Amy’s business majors), we need to sell everyone else on the value of thinking about what makes us human.

I think we as literature scholars can only do so by using as many opportunities as possible to show how the literature we study IS relevant to our position as human beings. And if we are going to comment on our humanity (or lack thereof), then we need to relate it to other peoples’ experiences.

One of the most stimulating conversations I’ve had over the last few months was the time I found myself in a crowd of financial analysts, health care professionals and lawyers explaining how the topics that my dissertation engages with relate to their worlds. The coolest part of the conversation was that they understood what I was talking about when I was able to relate my study to examples from their walks of life.

To me, that’s what the humanities prepares us for – it trains us to see the human condition in all its variety. I think sometimes we can get so stuck in our own specialties, that we forget there are other worlds of experience out there. Perhaps that is the challenge for the humanities in the twenty-first century: to make itself known as a study of the human condition that has relevance for all other humans as well.