The Humanities in the Age of Post-Literacy
The Humanities in the Age of Post-Literacy

Summary/Abstract: An assessment of the future perspectives of the humanities might most appropriately take its lead from Bernhard Fabian’s central contention in his Book, Library, and Humanities Research (1983). As Fabian writes: “the subject field of the humanities is in the first place, or even exclusively, constituted by texts in the widest sense of the term.” Let us add that the subject field, and at the same time the precondition, of the conventional humanities is the written, the fixed text. The emergence and development of the humanities were initially bound up with the spread of alphabetic writing, and, subsequently, with the development of printing; the original task of the nascent humanities disciplines was a thoroughly practical one: to build up our knowledge about the characteristics of the new media with the aim of exploiting this knowledge in everyday life— for economic, educational, or political benefits.

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