Product Description
Every humanities textbook claims to be new, innovative, enlightening, refreshing. In the end, however, most of them become a combination of inventories of museum works and retellings of world history. As a result, himanities courses are often dry exercises in memorizing names and titles, dates and places. Worse still, perhaps, humanities study may end up pursuing only a single genre, such as literature or the visual arts. While gaining a thorough knowledge of all that not be the correct goal of an introduction to humanities course.
The truly important part-the ability of the student to learn and acquire personal creative and critical skills and thereby to understand the arts-is, unfortunately, either neglected or handled cursorily. Butterflies and All That Jazz: An Introduction to the Humanities is an attempt to reverse this trend and to make the compulsory arts course what it should have been all along: student-oriented.
