What we've been up to

From the new issue's books section: Is the image dead? Many academic art historians, committed to a narrow Enlightenment project, have almost made it so. They say that the sort of mythmaking and ritualism that might bring life to an image (and perhaps enliven and inspire us) are fundamentally dangerous. But, as Wheaton College art history professor Matthew J. Milliner argues in "The Intractable Image," there are holdouts to this secular consensus. Literature scholar Thomas Pfau is one, and in his recent book, Incomprehensible Certainty, Pfau plumbs the metaphysical depths of the image. He argues, Milliner says, that an image can be a kind of agent that scrutinizes, challenges, and brings us outside ourselves.

"If this sounds metaphysical or almost religious, that is because it is. Pfau, who also holds an appointment at Duke Divinity School, proudly announces his 'unrepentant openness to metaphysical questions and…implicit rejection of a hermeneutics of suspicion.' Thus inclined, he sets out in Incomprehensible Certainty to explore in detail precisely the terrain the history of art declared off-limits in order to exist, terrain which art history's late dilation into 'visual culture' has yet to adequately traverse. The regime of mere aesthetics proceeds by the 'quarantining of the image within a strictly immanent and sharply circumscribed pictorial rhetoric.' But for Pfau, 'wherever we perceive organized visible form as an image we become aware of how the order of the visible is always ontologically—or, more precisely, analogically—linked to a numinous, and as such invisible, domain.'"

Also from the new issue's books section: In 1979, the University of California Press published a collection of essays from an idiosyncratic professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin named D.S. Carne-Ross. The book, Instaurations, takes up the work of poets from antiquity to the present in a series of six case studies—Pindar to Pound, as the subtitle puts it. Joseph M. Keegin, philosopher and an editor at The Point, argues in "Language for Life" that the book is much more than an exercise in literary criticism. It is a plea for a renewal of literacy by means of that most classicist of occupations: translation.

"Instaurations shows a thinker, scholar, and teacher at the peak of his interpretive and argumentative powers. And his challenges to the academic study of literature (and the humanities more broadly) are even more poignant now than they were when the book was first published: Your average English professor these days is more likely to be applying Marxian economics or poststructuralist anthropology to literature…than treating novels and poems as sources of wisdom in their own right. Classics departments, desperate for relevance in the face of declining enrollments, are increasingly willing to cut language requirements for majors and postgraduates in the name of 'inclusivity' and 'expanding access'—but they're seemingly unaware that knowledge of Greek and Latin is access, to a wealth of riches far stranger and more rewarding than the denunciations of time-bound American professional theorists would have you believe."

Read more from the fall issue:

"Real and Fake Accounts" by David Bosworth.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy writes about sex positivity.

"Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End" by Michael Weinman and Isaac Ariail Reed.

Sarah M. Brownsberger writes about disturbing changes in language.

"Is There Hope for Marriage?" by Mary Harrington.

Andrew Lynn reviews Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley by Carolyn Chen.

"Deep Down Things in a Time of Panic" by Ian Marcus Corbin.

Jonathan D. Teubner reviews The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media by Kevin Driscoll.

"The Impotence of Being Clever" by Alexander Stern.

David Stromberg writes about the Jewish yearning for Zion.

"The Right to Care" by Adin Lears.

Alan Jacobs considers the strange appeal of believing lies.

"On Hope and Holy Fools" by Tara Isabella Burton.

Charles Mathewes reviews Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: The winter storm that recently blasted much of North America with unseasonably cold temperatures and bitter winds perhaps made some of us reconsider whether winter is a good idea after all. It also reminded us here at The Hedgehog Review of a recent, though at this point classic, essay from the archives: "On Winter" by Matt Dinan for the spring 2020 issue. The discomfort of winter, Dinan writes, is a reminder of something often easily ignored in our technologically advanced societies, namely the "very real connection between the body and the mind." And winter conditions frequently force us to come together in ways we otherwise don't:

"When a snowstorm is coming, we're called on, in a relatively low-stakes way, to evaluate, deliberate, and decide—together. Schools, businesses, government offices, sports teams, choirs, volunteer groups, families, friends—every part of civil society needs to decide whether it's worth staying open, going out, or hunkering down at home. Snowy places don't declare a 'state of emergency' for every storm; we learn to figure it out for ourselves."

From further afield:

At MIT Technology Review, Abby Ohlheiser argues that we are witnessing the brain death of Twitter.

For the New York Times, Jonathan Malesic writes about how a knowing attitude and an overemphasis on career goals undermines college education.

At Unherd, Costică Brădățan considers Roberto Colasso, one of the great underappreciated minds of our time.