| This project is fashioned as an offering to unity, connection, and integration. The enormous success of the sciences and social sciences, with their frequent foci on narrow specialization, has provided a model which--when adopted by the humanities--proves to have a debilitating effect. In an effort to oppose this specialist tendency in the humanities and to contribute to the healing of the splits which have resulted from an abundance of narrow specialization, this project takes an integrated approach to one of the fundamental problems within the humanities: the question of death. The creative center of the work is a unified series of personal, speculative, interdisciplinary essays which emerge from a consideration of the concord between death and hope. The essays draw upon images and expressions from throughout the humanities as a means of further demonstrating connectedness.;After demonstrating in a brief introductory chapter the important contribution made by a unified approach to the humanities, Chapter II provides an historical perspective of the humanities. The history of the idea of the humanities as a unified field and the various meanings, understandings, and definitions which have been applied to the field are traced from antiquity through the twentieth century.;Chapter III places the essays of the final chapter within the long tradition of the humanities. The problem of death, the unifying theme of the creative essays, is shown to be a fundamental question within the humanities and--through a consideration of the content and form of the work--the relationship between the essays and the entire field is signified.;The series of essays in Chapter IV considers the complex idea of death from a variety of perspectives. As artistic responses to the theme of death and hope, the essays are creative, original, personal explorations of the meaningful connections which the theme has to human existence. |
