Atomised

Abstract

The concept of reductionism has been and remains, as Andy Mousley’s Introduction to this volume illustrates, a crucial reference point for the counter-assertion of humanistic values. To speak for the humanistic, whether as a theory of human subjectivity or as an approach to disciplinarity, has tended to involve speaking in the name of those qualities of depth, breadth, richness and complexity which are implied to be lacking in alternative domains where the threat of ‘reduction’ to a simpler or shallower set of coordinates is in play. Thus, Mousley worries both that his enumeration of eight key principles of a new literary humanism will seem reductive ‘(like “rolling out” a business plan)’ and that his use of specialised terms in the teaching of literary theory may have left him ‘complicit in the reduction of education to a set of quantifiable skills’. Literature itself, the locus of reinvigorated humanistic value in this volume as a whole, retains by contrast an holistic embrace of thought and feeling, mind and body; the quintes-sentially literary principle of symbolic condensation ‘does not equate to a reduction, because of the creative impulse to explore all the facts of emotion, theme or subject’.