Is that it, do humanists (really) want to speak with the dead?

Steven Klein, The New Science Wars, The Chronicle Review, 12.16.16:

Because it dwells on these historically specific phenomena, humanistic inquiry is equipped to understand the contours of human experience and activity in a way the sciences cannot. The stance of humanistic inquiry is one of dialogue with its subjects — an imaginary one, of course, but one full of chastisement and support. In Stephen Greenblatt’s well-known phrase, humanistic scholarship springs from "the desire to speak with the dead." Scholars are interested in how people understood themselves, how they interacted with their cultural worlds, how they negotiated their everyday lives. At the core of the humanities is the attempt to enter into distant worlds and to see their connection to us.

[Alas] I think that's how it is, certain with literary criticism. After WWII the discipline decided to ground itself in the activity of interpretation and that, in turn, is grounded in conversation. That allows a certain kind of access, access necessary and valuable. But it also closes certain things off. Klein continues:

Because it rests on this act of imaginative judgment, humanistic scholarship can never suspend or escape the particular perspective of the researcher. To understand someone’s reasons for doing something, we are, to some extent, always imagining how we would act under similar circumstances. As a result, humanistic approaches can never fully embrace the ideal of pure scientific objectivity. Nor would they want to. The humanities cannot help but view humans as morally responsible agents. We are interested not just in why people do something, but in the reasons they themselves give. Interpreting our actions through the lens of the justifications we provide, a humanistic account passes some judgment on those justifications. We want to know the reasons people do things so we can reflect on whether our current reasons are good reasons.

I don't know about scientific objectivity – as you may know, "I don't give a crap about science" – but, objectivity, yes. That's what I'm after in the study of literary form, its analysis and description.

And if I had to speculate about how that kind of inquiry is grounded in a basic human activity, I'd pick tracking. At some point the skilled animal tracker may well try to imagine what the animal is thinking at every step of the way; in fact, I'm sure of it. But that's always in service of interpreting the signs, which are out there in space. Those signs are objects, as are the animals whose presence/absence they betray (in the act of tracking). Tracking is not an entirely visual activity – one attends to sounds and smells – but it is grounded in what you see before you.

And that, in my view, is what describing literary form is about. You are visualizing the text and using visual means to describe it, whether simple tables,, or diagrams of various kinds. These visual aids are not mere aids, they're the map itself.

Do literary critics really want to abandon the study of literary form? Though "abandon" is a bit of a stretch, at least from my point of view. As far as I'm concerned, the discipline has never really engaged with literary form. Nor, in a sense, with the text.  But those are larger discussions, one's I've engaged here and there.

Addendum, an hour or so later: What I dislike about this kind of argument is that there is little or no sense of loss, that this humanist stance has real costs, that it closes off avenues to worthwhile understanding. It's all well and good to argue for "dialog with the dead". But to do so without realizing that that is a limited view, that's unfortunate. That is enslavement to the past. I want to see humanists who choose the dialogic stance while at the same time recognizing its limitations, its cost.

H/t 3QD.