English Department 2.0. After spending about a minute establishing that his department has the finest credentials in traditional areas of literary scholarship, Richard E. Miller of Rutgers University turns for the remaining few minutes of this YouTube video to a vision of the New Humanities centered on the new media and the shifting access to authority that goes with it. It's got to be one of the most hopeful and visionary things I've heard anyone say about an American university in a long time.


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Choice, solidarity, truth. Just back from a lovely production of Death of a Salesman at our beautiful downtown South Bend Civic Theater. In the first act, the moral center of the play is the mother, who recognizes her husband's decline and whose outraged speech to her sons near the end of the act is electrifying:

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

The moral center in the second act shifts to the son Biff, who tries at last to get beyond bitterness and illusion to the truth of his ordinary life, believing that by acknowledging the truth he can proceed to choose the life he actually desires, not the dream he has been tempted by for so long. He tries to bring the others along, but fails as his brother vows not very convincingly at the end to give up his corrupt and self-deceiving ways and become a success. But this dream is brutally undercut by the indifference of the business figures in the play -- which Willy himself summarizes in a heart-breaking scene in which his boss refuses to help him after a lifetime of service:

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

And yet that his how he is treated. I identify three main values here: the wife's allegiance to her vulnerable husband in his decline, the son's decision to choose his own path rather than be swept away by the pyramid scheme that is business in this play, and an increasing allegiance to telling the truth. Choice, solidarity, truth...

If you feel you have no choices, if you can't get closer to the truth of your life, if you have no community you can rely on -- a person in these circumstances might easily be destroyed. If you see some room to move, if you have some allies, if you can involve yourself in conversations that bring you closer to the knowledge you need to proceed, then even in difficult times a person will probably be okay. The play implies a little theory of mental and wider social health, then.

It's a bit of a stretch to carry on the discussion to other realms, but why not do it anyway? The long-delayed gratification of much of our schooling, the Darwinian struggle of our politics and a good part of our political blogging -- these seem to miss the three insights of the play.

There are moments when something reminds us that it could be otherwise. See the countering gesture in Senator Obama's speech on race several weeks ago, for example, or the impromptu speech Robert F. Kennedy gave in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King died, which included a call for conversation and which asserted a powerful common ground:

It's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in . . . . But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. (Full text)

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