Postwar specialization and fragmented media have shrunk the scope of humanistic scholarship

Evidence

All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge, gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it’s an even more depressing fact that, since Auerbach’s death in 1957, both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. The book culture based on archival research as well as general principles of mind that once sustained humanism as a historical discipline have almost disappeared. Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in the mass media. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Fragmented knowledge and standardization as forces hostile to deep reading connect to the reader’s earlier silence/attention and communication-technology threads. — connects to: Specialization and standardization have shrunk humanistic research since 1957; Scholarly fields are constrained by society, institutions, and cultural tradition; Postmodernism fragmented into disassociated specialisms that modernism once unified. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 729 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 43
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Specialization and standardization have shrunk humanistic research since 1957; Scholarly fields are constrained by society, institutions, and cultural tradition; Postmodernism fragmented into disassociated specialisms that modernism once unified. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 729 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Specialization and standardization have shrunk humanistic research since 1957 #corroborates (0.95)
• Shared mass cultural events now outweigh the predicted fragmentation into infinite niches #complicates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 653