Scholarship and Work
Smith is a well-known writer, most particularly for her 1988 work on critical theory, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. In this work, she attempts to situate the various liberal, conservative, and other views of "values" within her "metametatheory" of contingencies, an economics-influenced theoretical approach. She uses her theory to address literary, aesthetic, and other types of values, attempting to discern whether any objective standards may be applied.
Other works include Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, and an edition of Shakespeare's sonnets; she has published numerous books and articles on language, literature, and critical theory.
In recent years she has been doing considerable work on science and the humanities, including Scandalous Knowledge and her 2006 Terry lectures at Yale, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.
Read more about this topic: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Famous quotes containing the words scholarship and, scholarship and/or work:
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the overwrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)