ABSTRACT

This paper explores the nature of academic research in the Humanities. It questions whether such scholarship has been instrumentalised to a narrowly individualistic, short-termist and action-orientated pursuit – whether, in simpler terms, there is too much writing and not enough reading. In the first part of the paper, the authors argue that such instrumentalisation is evident in the very language we use; we speak of research ‘outputs’, research ‘impacts’ and research ‘targets’, and all of these terms position Humanist scholarship closer to archery than human understanding. In the second part of the paper, Mahon and Henry foreground particularly the relationship between scholarship and silence as well as the importance of close and careful reading. Throughout the paper, the authors draw on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell in order to highlight a more edifying framework for research in the Humanities – one that might resist the darker impulses of a marketised academy.

摘要

本文探讨了人文学科学术研究的性质。它质疑这种学术研究是否被用于狭隘的个人主义、短期主义和以行动为导向的追求——简单地说，是否有太多的写作和没有足够的阅读。在论文的第一部分，作者认为这种工具化在我们使用的语言中很明显；我们谈到研究“产出”、研究“影响”和研究“目标”，所有这些术语都使人文主义学术更接近于射箭而不是人类的理解。在论文的第二部分，马洪和亨利特别强调了学术与沉默之间的关系以及仔细仔细阅读的重要性. 在整篇论文中，作者借鉴了拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生和斯坦利·卡维尔的工作，以突出一个更具启发性的人文研究框架——一个可能抵制市场化学院的黑暗冲动的框架。