The Humanities as an Export Commodity

Abstract

In proposing my title, I intended to reflect on three or so decades in which the interpretive disciplines in the humanities, in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism, with the revival of psychoanalysis and the invention of feminist theory, and with the expanding universe of culture as the play ground of study, did appear to generate paradigms of analysis and under standing that began to move across the border, sometimes with fanfare, sometimes in unmarked vans. There was a sense in the social science and professional republics at our frontiers that the humanities had developed methods (often themselves derived from such disciplines as linguistics and anthropology) that enabled important questions about the nature of the human animal as sign-bearing and sense-making. To my mind, these questions?posed in the structural study of myth, for instance, or in the analysis of the narrative construction of reality?remain important today. A few weeks ago, some students in my introduction-to narrative class, itself a creation of the 1970s, told me it had changed their lives. But I think the more common reaction was expressed recently by one of my colleagues at Yale Law School, who said she no longer looks to the interpretive humanities for inspiration. History, yes, but after that