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A review by jthhhhhhhh
Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry
4.0
Wendell Berry: my constant antidote to graduate school.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.