Rethinking the Crisis of Humanities in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Abstract

The increasing gap between Humanities and the so-called STEM fields is an intellectual concern that caused great controversy. While some scholars, critics and theorists believe that Humanities are indeed in crisis as humans become more interested in empirical sciences and modern technologies than human sciences, others criticize this perception and insist that they are in constant motion. Postmodern philosophers, for instance, reject the statement that Humanities are in peril and disapprove of the supposed supremacy and unquestionable correctness of the practical sciences that are fostered by modernist thought. In his study, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard criticizes modernists’ tendency to devalue Humanities and calls into question the assumption that natural sciences are unified, progressive, and aim at the absolute truth that serves humanity. The French philosopher affirms that “scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge” (Lyotard 1984, 29). Lyotard’s claim goes against modernists’ view of science as a superior form of knowledge, as he believes that natural sciences themselves depend on Humanities to exist and explain their empirical findings.

In literature, many writers, including Edward Albee, have shown a similar interest in the exploration of the confusing dichotomy between human sciences on the one hand, and natural and empirical sciences on the other. Albee sheds light on this problematic situation of Humanities and comments on the increasing interest in natural sciences in his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This paper attempts to read Albee’s work from the Lyotardian perspective, so as to study his dramatization of the complex connection between human sciences and empirical sciences, and to examine his critical attitude towards the assumed preeminence of scientific knowledge.