Why Study Humanities in 60 Seconds

Joseph Skibell (Associate Professor, English) has one minute to explain the importance of the humanities. His debut novel, "A Blessing on the Moon," received the prestigious Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Book of the Month Club selection, the book was named one of the year's best by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages. Skibell's second novel, "The English Disease," received the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. In addition, his work has been widely anthologized and his short stories and essays have appeared in Story, Tikkun, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and other periodicals. He joined the English Department/Creative Writing Program at Emory University in 1999, and is working on a third novel, due out in fall 2010.

Prof. Skibells homepage
http://english.emory.edu/people/faculty/skibell.htm

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[BandofSorensons]

How did creative writing prepare you for law school? It did not, and that stuff about "telling a story" was just cheesy BS because that is not remotely what lawyers do. You could see in his eyes that as this guy was telling the story he didn't even believe himself! Besides it is fallacious to assert the humanities are advantageous on grounds that major X prepared Joe well for career Y when it is painfully obvious that maybe a non-humanities major would have prepared him even more.