In her 1961 essay “The Crisis in Culture,” German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt identified the rise of mass society as pushing (high) culture into obsolescence or philistinism. The trend worried her because she believed that engaging with cultural objects gives us the ability to understand in more nuance and depth our human experience and to transcend the situatedness of our own individual lives. Over half of a century after the publication of “Crisis in Culture,” we continue to hear complaints the degradation of culture around the world. We continue to face the need to defend cultural production against an increasingly utilitarian logic that demands intellectual activities lead to practical results and useful applications; or, reducing aesthetic value to instrumentalism and collapsing high level, cognitive abilities, such as processing complex language and mastering historical knowledge, into a subset of practical soft skills.
Arendt made a passionate plea for restoring a cultura animi for her time: the continuous and systematic cultivation, through exemplary works, of values, beliefs, and expression that can define, in her terms, a “dwelling place” enduring beyond any individual human being. The Ciceronian origin of the term cultura animi stressed the rhetorical-oratorical dimension of culture, as the making of a community through argument, both agreement and disagreement, but in reasoned form around shared principles and commitments. At a time when destruction and division have become a mode of being, a return to, and renewal of the ideal of cultura animi might be a question of sheer survival. We must try to find such survival, and to this end this course centers Arendt’s vision of cultura animi, as not merely a list of great works or even aesthetic norms, but most importantly as the very act of selecting and engaging with moral and aesthetic values.
Arendt’s understanding of cultura animi was also a political project, and it can teach us what it means to share a life with others around common values and beliefs. At the same time, her essay suffers from a particular kind of conservatism and Western bias, as she not only privileges high culture in her definition of aesthetic value, but also exclusively European high culture. British intellectual history is a subtle subtext in this essay. For Arendt, Hamlet and My Fair Lady are iconic cultural references, just as Matthew Arnold is an essential interlocutor, albeit only mentioned in passing. In this course, we will start with Arendt’s essay but will then build around it a critical network composed of British thinkers from the 18th century to today. As we move across centuries and schools of thought, our roster will not only get more diverse but also more controversial, hopefully pushing us to resist generalizations and cliches that glorify high culture and nostalgically lament the good old days, while still acknowledging that we are living in challenging time.
Invited Course Instructor: Prof. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
LEARNING GOALS
- you will be introduced to several important concepts and will study their analytic purchase as well as limitations. Examples of concepts include: cultura animi; taste; enlarged mentality; aesthetic judgment; humanism
- you will learn to situate concepts in large contexts (multiple authors, texts, and schools of thought) and understand different views of the same idea
- you will practice moving from the micro-level of textual reading to the macro-level of cultural analysis
ASSIGNMENTS
- Response paper (based on a reading you will choose yourself from the course materials)
- Concept map (based on 5-7 concepts covered in the course readings)
- Research proposal (for a potential article or thesis)
ASSIGNMENTS
SCHEDULE AND ASSIGNED READINGS
Week 1, February 24: Introduction. The significance of British cultural references in Western philosophy. How do intellectual conversations emerge? Preview of course readings, course expectations, assignments. No readings.
Week 2, March 3: Why Arendt? The significance of British cultural references in the Western intellectual canon
Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Culture
Janet Roitman, Crisis as political concept
Week 3, March 10: Taming nature: foundational ideas
David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757)
Matthew Arnold, chapters 1 and 2 from Culture and Anarchy
Week 4, March 17: Power through culture, power for culture
Arendt on British imperialism (selections from The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Amartya Sen, Democracy as a Universal Value
Week 5, March 24: Crisis as nostalgia: deconstructing tradition and canon
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Virtues, the Unity of a Life, and the Concept of Tradition (in After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)
Mary Beard, Do Classics Have a Future? (in Confronting the Classics, Liveright Publications, 2013)
Jhumpa Lahiri, “An Ode to the Mighty Optative Notes of a Would-Be Translator” (from Translating Myself and Others, Princeton University Press, 2022)
Week 6, March 31: Humanism: a fraught legacy
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Isaiah Berlin, The Fox and the Hedgehog
Week 7, April 7: Culture and multiculturalism in post-empire
Sarah Ahmed, Multiculturalism and the Proximity of Strangers (from Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, Routledge 2000)
Zadie Smith, “Northwest London Blues” (from Feel Free, Penguin Press, 2018)
Week 8, April 14: Cultura animi and civility through/in language
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Laura Beers, The Thought Police. Censorship, Cancel Culture, and Fake News (in Orwell’s Ghosts, Norton, 2024)
Week 9, April 21: Spring break.
Week 10, April 28: Class symposium: Crisis in contemporary Romanian culture. Which concepts apply to the local context? Which solutions can we adopt?
British Cultural Studies 