Arts or humanities? It seems to me that arts and humanities are pretty much the same thing. To call them "arts" implies an approach from the creative direction, the creation of the humanities. Humanities implies the scholarly study of them.

Of course humanities can also include history, philosophy, and the study of "culture" in its non-artistic manifestations. Here's what's interesting to me: where does literature fall? In the area of the humanities as the study of history, philosophy, and culture in its non-artistic dimension, or among music, art, dance, and film? Writing literature is a fine art, if the name MFA means anything, but studying literature is often not considered the study of an art form.

Maybe the most important word to debate is culture. It is interesting how the word pulls us in two directions at once, away and from the arts. Cultural studies can gut itself by not being about culture any more, in the artistic sense. Or by simply defining culture as everything except literature, or by interpreting literature itself as the manifestation of "cultural" forces defined entirely in political terms.