Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts fiercely defends the liberal arts in and from an age of neoliberal capital and techno-corporatization run amok, arguing that the public university’s purpose is not vocational training, but rather the cultivation of what Fradenburg calls “artfulness,” including the art of making knowledge. In addition to sustained critical and creative thinking, the humanities develop the mind’s capacities for real-time improvisational communication and interpretation, without which we can neither thrive nor survive. Humanist pedagogy and research use play, experimentation and intersubjective exchange to foster forms of artfulness critical to the future of our species. From perception to reality-testing to concept-formation and logic, the arts and humanities teach us to see, hear and respond more keenly, and to imagine, or “model,” new futures and possibilities. Innovation of all kinds, technological or artistic, depends on the enhancement of the skills proper to staying alive.
Bringing together psychoanalysis, neuroscience, animal behavioral research, biology &amp; evolutionary theory, and premodern literarature (from Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare), Fradenburg offers a bracing polemic against the technocrats of higher education and a vibrant new vision for the humanities as both living art and new life science. Contrary to recent polemics that simply urge the humanities to become more scientistic or technology-focused, to demonstrate their utility or even trophy their uselessness, Staying Alive does something remarkably different: it argues for the humanism of a new scientific paradigm based on complexity theory and holistic and ecological approaches to knowledge-making. It urges us to take the further step of realizing not only that we can promote and enhance neuroplastic connectivity and social-emotional cognition, but also that the humanities have always already been doing so. “Nature always exceeds itself in its expressivity” — which is to say that living is itself an art, and artfulness is necessary for living: for adaptation and innovation, for forging rich and varied relationships with other minds, bodies and things, and thus, for thriving — whether in the boardroom or the art gallery, the biology lab or the recording studio, the alley or the playground, the book or the dream.
Staying Alive contains companion essays by Donna Beth Ellard (Rice University), Ruth Evans (Saint Louis University), Eileen A. Joy (BABEL Working Group), Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago), Daniel C. Remein (New York University), and Michael D. Snediker (University of Houston).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Eileen A. Joy: Prelude: Hands Off Our Jouissance: The Collaborative Risk of a Shared Disorganization // Chapter 1: Driving Education: A Crash Course // Fugue 1: Julie Orlemanski: An Army of Lovers // Chapter 2: Living the Liberal Arts: An Argument for Embodied Learning Communities // Fugue 2: Daniel C. Remein: Human-Tongued Basilisks // Chapter 3: Breathing with Lacan’s Seminar X: Expression and Emergence // Fugue 3: Ruth Evans: The Object Breath // Chapter 4: Life’s Reach: Territory, Display, Ekphrasis // Fugue 4: Donna Beth Ellard: Ekphrastic Beowulf: Defying Death and Staying Alive in the Academy // Coda: Michael D. Snediker: Fuzzy Thinking

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts

Education & Teaching

Snediker, Michael D.

Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye

Higher & Continuing Education

Punctum Books

Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer

Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world's most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear upon Chaucer's writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"-a way of reading change in the symbolic order-and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable. Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment-that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today-how to understand the religiosity of cultural forms, particularly chivalry, in the later Middle Ages and how to understand the ethics of Chaucer's famously nondidactic poetry-as well as in other fields of inquiry. A major rethinking of Chaucer, Sacrifice Your Love works in depth as well as across a broad range of topics from medievalism to psychoanalysis, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Univ. of Minnesota Press

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