Writing about the arts

For HUM 221 students --

A draft of a tip sheet I'll post to my faculty webpage on how to write about the humanities. I'll post more suggestions on ways to go about it as we go along, but I wanted to put something up ASAP for people who want to get started now. -- pe

When we’re writing about the humanities, we’re basically writing about works of art created by human beings. Even when we’re dealing with philosophical or religious ideas, they’re apt to be presented in some form of artistic expression -- an essay or story for example. The American Heritage Dictionary has two definitions of art that we’re concerned with here:

• Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature; and
  
• The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.

Under the second definition, it adds “[t]he study of these activities” and “[t]he product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group.”

The arts are varied. In Humanities 221, we touch on literature, religion, architecture, visual and performing arts in Native American cultures, and we focus on cross-cultural communication processes and culturally determined assumptions and beliefs in diverse cultural settings. In other words, we cover a wide range of artistic and cultural expression.

But there are several things the different forms of artistic expression have in common, and that fact can help us when we go to write about any of them.

For one thing, the humanities are not rocket science. There’s nothing like a “right” answer you can look up in the back of the book. Karen Goslik of the Dartmouth Writing Project explains:

Humanities as a field of study deals with questions for which there are no definitive answers. Consider the questions that have haunted the humanities for centuries: What is justice? The nature of friendship? The essence of God? The properties of truth? While scholars in this field certainly hope to address these questions in ways that are compelling and authoritative, they don't write first and foremost to establish consensus among their peers. In other words, they do not expect to create in their work a reliable, scientific truth.

Students of the sciences may well find this frustrating. Writing in the humanities is not about finding the answer, it's about finding an answer. The humanities concern themselves with the construction and deconstruction of meaning. They have as their center not the interpretation of hard evidence, but the interpretation of texts.

Keep that in the back of your mind – it’s “not about finding the answer, it's about finding an answer.” Here’s something else to keep in mind. Writing about the humanities is writing about texts. Goslik explains:

Evidence in the humanities is textual. In other words, scholars in this field work most often with written documents, though films, paintings, etc. are also understood as "texts." Humanities scholars read texts closely, looking for patterns, examining language, considering what is not present in the text, as well as what is.

The pattern of discourse in the humanities usually goes like this: a writer makes a claim, supports that claim with textual evidence, and then discusses the significance of the passage he has just quoted. This pattern of claim / textual support / discussion is repeated again and again until the writer feels that her argument has been made. What distinguishes the humanities from the sciences and the social sciences is that each claim is supported and discussed before the next claim is considered.

In other words, says Goslik, you don’t have to wait to discuss your findings under a separate heading at the end of the paper; instead, you discuss them as you go along.

You’ve done something like in high school English classes, right? When you wrote about a poem or a short story, you were analyzing a text. What may be new to you is this idea that a “text” isn’t just words. It can also be a movie, a painting -– or any other form of artistic expression.

Let’s go back to the dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “text” as the “original words of something written or printed” but also as “[s]omething, such as a literary work or other cultural product, regarded as an object of critical analysis.” It’s with that second meaning of the word that we’re dealing with in HUM 221. A Navajo sand painting can be a text. So can a powwow dance, a squash blossom necklace, a song, a musical composition or a story of how the world was created.

I'll add to this as we go along, but I wanted to get it up on the web for students who want to get started early.