"Go west, ever-young humanities"
Creators: name: Cid, Teresa
Publisher: name: Gaudium Sciendi
Year: 2022

description: The mid-nineteenth century politician and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, challenged his young countrymen with a forceful pronouncement, "Go West young man." Inspired by this assertion to move forward and search further by creatively continuing the journey into the future, I appropriate this call to action to the realm of the Humanities. Thus, the following pages propose to briefly reflect on the value of the Humanities as well as on the challenges they have met in the USA and elsewhere, especially in our own time, and the ways they may contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of being human and, above all, humane, as argued in the work of Jennifer Summit on the future of the Humanities. The reference to the concerns of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Williams Carlos Williams with the role of the Humanities in their different times, and their defense of literary imagination will be complemented by a reexamination of the richness of the American West, more specifically as a locus for historical and creative dialogues with the spiritual journey towards a much searched-for promised land, known since Puritan colonial times as an “errand into the wilderness.” Examples of this search for humane responses to human dire predicaments are discussed via two films, Meek’s Cuttof (2010), directed by Kelly Reichardt, and The Homesman (2014), directed by Tommy Lee Jones, both new Westerns which, in their own way, follow up on the ethical citizen concerns present in Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). The call for an active involvement in the social and educational realms in order to aim at building a more humane world is also a deep concern of a major figure of our time, Pope Francis. The mid-nineteenth century politician and editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, challenged his young countrymen with a forceful pronouncement, "Go West young man." Inspired by this assertion to move forward and search further by creatively continuing the journey into the future, I appropriate this call to action to the realm of the Humanities. Thus, the following pages propose to briefly reflect on the value of the Humanities as well as on the challenges they have met in the USA and elsewhere, especially in our own time, and the ways they may contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of being huma and, above all, humane, as argued in the work of Jennifer Summit on the future of the Humanities. The reference to the concerns of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Williams Carlos Williams with the role of the Humanities in their different times, and their defense of literary imagination will be complemented by a reexamination of the richness of the American West, more specifically as a locus for historical and creative dialogues with the spiritual journey towards a much searched-for promised land, known since Puritan colonial times as an “errand into the wilderness.” Examples of this search for humane responses to human dire predicaments are discussed via two films, Meek’s Cuttof (2010), directed by Kelly Reichardt, and The Homesman (2014), directed by Tommy Lee Jones, both new Westerns which, in their own way, follow up on the ethical citizen concerns present in Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). The call for an active involvement in the social and educational realms in order to aim at building a more humane world is also a deep concern of a major figure of our time, Pope Francis.
description: Gaudium Sciendi, n. 22 (2022)