The pale of words

by James Anderson Winn

In this book, James Anderson Winn enters the debate about the perilous state of humanities education today. Winn, founding director of a leading humanities institute, contends that the disciplines we call the humanities have identified themselves excessively with the written word. He exposes the hostility and fear with which writers and philosophers throughout Western history have regarded forms of expression not couched in words, despite the fact that much of what humanists study originates in performance. Winn's readings of such figures as Plato, Augustine, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Rousseau, and Kant underscore the long-standing Western prejudice against music and the similarly stubborn prejudices against theatrical display and the visual arts. The author then asks how the turn toward theory might help us reconsider the troubled relations between the humanities and performance; he discovers a bias toward the linguistic model deeply embedded even in the works of theorists who claim to