As you know from your readings in the Humanities Core Course Writer’s Guide this year, the humanities are fields of study that look at the ways in which humans have created meaning through their thoughts, their actions, and their creations. Humanistic research questions usually ask how or why certain meanings are generated from human activity (that is, interpretive questions). Philosophical research questions, like those asked by Dean van den Abbeele, consider the way human thought works in practice, as well as evaluating the logical and ethical principles that underlie our thinking, our actions, and the world around us. Historians like Professor Alice Fahs seek to understand past human actions and events in terms of their human significance both for the participants and the interpreters. Literary critics (like Professors John Smith, Oren Izenberg, and Carol Burke), and art historians and musicologists (like Professor James Herbert) study the meaning of different artifacts that humans have made and are especially interested in how their “madeness” creates meaning. Those scholar begin with the premise that meaning resides in the formal and rhetorical components of a text, image, or film, in the varying meanings of language and visual form. They, therefore, ask questions about how the language or visual composition of the text or visual object shapes meaning. (HCC Writer’s Handbook 5-12)
The assignment for your research paper asks you to ask how and why your war artifact creates meaning in a cultural context. By now, you have hopefully honed in on a particular artifact (and attending context) that you intend to study. In your third blog post for the quarter, you should brainstorm what disciplinary approaches and humanistic research questions you might pose about your chosen artifact. Your approach can certainly be interdisciplinary, and may even take up questions that are not “proper” to the humanities (like those of social science). Nevertheless, you must ask and attempt to answer explicit humanistic research questions in your project.
It might help to think about how you intend to frame your artifact in the larger context. If your artifact in some way represents a personal or local aspect of a context, how might it represent a larger or global phenomenon? What problems might be related to your primary source, and how might your interpretive offer significant insight into the problem? What neglected problem becomes clearer or comes to light from analyzing this artifact? Does your artifact represent a neglected or silenced voice or series of voices? To what silenced group does the artifact give a voice? How does the artifact indirectly allude to the problem of a group of people being silenced? Perhaps cultures or subcultures interact by way of your artifact. In that case, which cultures or subcultures are related to the artifact, and what kind of relationship exists between them?
Questions you should be able to answer include:
- What is to be gained by studying my primary source in a specific historical and cultural context?
- Which fields of the humanities would study a primary source like mine?
- How would those fields analyze my primary source differently?
- Which features of my primary source illuminate or highlight controversy?
- Does my primary source give a voice to a silenced element of a population?
- How does my primary source relate to the major themes explored this year?
- What are the ethos, logos, and pathos of my primary source?
As you begin to research secondary sources on your topic next week, the way you intend to frame your artifact might change and the humanistic research questions you intend to ask might shift. As you reevaluate the framing of your artifact, your disciplinary approaches, or humanistic research questions, please update this post so that I can see how your thinking develops.
Please upload the third blog post to your websites by Sunday, May 1st.