“Working for Your Bread: The Value of the Humanities” Lecture by Arnold Weinstein

“Working for Your Bread:  The Value of the Humanities”  Humanities in the World Lecture by Arnold Weinstein

‘Working for your bread’ is a phrase drawn from Kierkegaard, and it signals (for him) a kind of timeless balance between effort and reward, a balance that is often skewed in real life but exists in the ‘soul.’ The expression also designates a form of ‘compensation’ which – today – seems in jeopardy for students who work in the Humanities. Speaker Arnold Weinstein, Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, argues that the phrase – the connection between effort and reward – defines the very nature of humanistic knowing, the kind of ‘experiential knowing’ that we get from literature and art, which is radically at odds with the ‘information-culture’ of our time. Many classic texts center on just this drama: data exploding into experience.

This event is part of the Pell Humanities Initiative in Rhode Island to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible.