The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences - Softcover

Seth Rudy; Rachael Scarborough King

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350242284 ISBN 13: 9781350242289

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

Synopsis

This book brings together short contributions from knowledge workers in a wide variety of disciplines, both inside and outside the academy, to revisit a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is "the last or furthest end of knowledge"? As such, this book is about why we do what we do, and how we might know when we are done.

In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular "ends," that is, purposes, as well as having end-points - points at which the projects would be complete. As we experience an ongoing shift to the "knowledge economy" of the Information Age, we ask: do we still conceptualize knowledge in this way? Does an individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint ? What do an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code share in terms of purpose and potential?

In the nineteenth century, the universities of Europe institutionalized the modern academic disciplines. Many branches of knowledge have since gone their separate ways, but recent changes in technologies and institutions, and mounting political pressure, have refocused attention on the specialized nature of knowledge. This book therefore looks both backward and forward, on the one hand historicizing concepts of the "end" and on the other projecting those concepts into the future. It realigns knowledge producers from what we now think of as widely disparate areas around a single question in order to better discern perceived distinctions as well as to reveal shared language, ideals, and aspirations. Chapters focus on areas as diverse as AI; Black Studies; Literary Studies; Political Activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself.

Bringing together essays from activists such as Ady Barkin in addition to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, these essays aim to uncover a life after disciplinarity for subjects such as English, Classical Studies, and journalism, that face immediate threats to the structure if not the substance of their contributions. The essays in this collection, then--whether reflective, historical, eulogistic, or polemical--may together chart a preliminary course towards the reorganization of knowledge production as a whole.

About this title

About the Author

Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, USA; she studies the literature and media of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in newspapers, periodicals, and letters. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures. She completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

Seth Rudy is Associate Professor and Charles M. Glover Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA, where he studies the history of ideas and encyclopedic knowledge projects of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He completed his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and his BFA in Film Production at the Tisch School of the Arts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350242284
• ISBN 13: 9781350242289
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Seth Rudy, Rachael Scarborough King