Interdisciplinarity

Joe Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135245856
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Interdisciplinarity covers one of the most important changes in attitude and methodology in the history of the university.

Taking the study of English as its main example, this fully updated second edition examines the ways in which we have organized knowledge into disciplines, and are now reorganizing it into new configurations as existing structures come to seem restrictive. Joe Moran traces the history and use of the term 'interdisciplinarity', tackling such vital topics as:

• 
  
  

• the rise of the disciplines
• interdisciplinary English
• Literary and Cultural Studies
• 'theory' and the disciplines
• texts and histories
• literature and science, space and nature.

Including an updated further reading section and new concluding chapter, Interdisciplinarity is the ideal entry point into one of today's most heated critical debates.

1
INTERDISCIPLINARY ENGLISH

More than any other subject, English has been at the centre of academic debates about the shaping and division of knowledge. As a relative latecomer to disciplinary consolidation, it has often been torn between the institutional imperative to stake out its own territory, define its activities and justify its autonomy from other areas of study, and its reliance on the approaches and subject matter of other disciplines. Indeed, it is possible to argue that all the major critical developments and controversies within English since its inception as a university subject have been related in some sense to the difficulty of containing its concerns within a single discipline and to its interdisciplinary possibilities. As Harold Rosen puts it, English is

the least subject-like of subjects, the least susceptible to definition by reference to the accumulation of wisdom within a single academic discipline. No single set of informing ideas dominate its heartland. No one can confidently map its frontiers: it colonizes and is colonized. When we inspect the practices which cluster together uncomfortably under its banner, they appear so diverse, contradictory, arbitrary and random as to defy analysis and explanation.

(Rosen 1981: 5)

From its earliest origins in British colleges and universities, English’s weak institutional base, its newness and insecurity as a discipline, meant that it was more likely than the established disciplines to interrogate its own assumptions and practices. Critics from D.J. Palmer onwards have traced the roots of English as the ‘poor man’s classics’ in Mechanics’ Institutes, evening classes and non-Oxbridge colleges and universities, where it was sometimes taught alongside other ‘national’ subjects such as history and geography (Palmer 1965: vii, 18). Since the birth of a new discipline is always partly dependent on the accumulation of intellectual prestige – and particularly on whether or not influential institutions and scholars recognize it as a separate entity – it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that English was fully accepted as a reputable area of study, largely as a result of being established within the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Even then, it was looked down upon by the more traditional disciplines as what would nowadays be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject, an easy option for the less able students. William Sanday, Professor of Theology, supported the introduction of a School of English at Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, because ‘there were the women to be considered, and the third rate men who would go on to become schoolmasters’ (Bergonzi 1990: 41).

This comment points to a further problem which still vexes the subject: unlike many other academic disciplines, English does not make a strong connection between education and training for future careers. Science and professional subjects, which partly developed as a response to the demand for specialists in capitalist societies, tend to be targeted at specific areas of the graduate marketplace, and service the economy with ‘human capital’ in concrete ways. Most English students will be familiar with the ribbing by students in subjects such as law, engineering and medicine along these lines, as in the graffiti underneath the toilet-roll holder, ‘English degrees, please take one’, or the equally hilarious: ‘What do you say to an English graduate? Big Mac and Fries, please.’

This is part of a wider question about the non-specialized nature of English and the fact that its object of study – literature – is generally accessible to those working outside the discipline in a way that, say, particle physics or differential equations are not. And this is still the case: even with the huge boom in popular science and history writing over the last few years, these kinds of books are still greatly outnumbered by fiction, poetry and drama in bookshops and libraries. One of the reasons for this is that literature is about everything – love, sex, friendship, family relationships, ageing, death, social and historical change, religious faith, intellectual ideas, and so on. In short, it is about life in all its diversity, and this is hard to accommodate within the narrow parameters of a discipline. As Leslie Fiedler says, ‘literary criticism is always becoming “something else,” for the simple reason that literature is always “something else”’ (Klein 1996: 137). Unless we are solely concerned with the mechanical and formal properties of language, sooner or later we have to start dealing with the relationship between words and their referents, or between literature and ‘the outside world’. Mark Schoenfield and Valerie Traub thus suggest that the study of literature necessarily contains a contextual element: ‘To the extent that literary criticism has concerned itself with reference, it has had an interdisciplinary object … The assumption that words mean is itself interdisciplinary’ (‘Forum: Defining Interdisciplinarity’ 1996: 280).

The theory and practice of interpreting texts – hermeneutics – which has formed the main activity of literary studies since at least the end of the First World War, also derives from two much older disciplines, theology and law. Holy scripture was the primary object of early textual study and interpretation. Medieval bibles were often extensively annotated, for example, so that the textual commentaries merged with and sometimes overwhelmed the words of the Bible itself. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century greatly increased the opportunities for such interpretation by taking the responsibility for biblical exegesis away from the Catholic Church in Rome and dispersing it amongst individual theological scholars. Martin Luther’s dictum was sola Scriptura (‘scripture alone’): only by interpreting the Bible itself, rather than by accepting the authority of the established Church, could the will of God be known. Biblical scholars today practise skills of close textual analysis and background research which are also employed by literary critics, and they ask many of the same questions: about authorship, the status of supporting sources, translation and even canonicity, since the term ‘canon’ derives from attempts within the Christian Church to separate authoritative from apocryphal biblical texts. In the field of law, the interpretation of a relatively fixed canon of legal texts, which is subtly modified by new statutes and judicial rulings, has always required a large element of textual study; it involves deciphering the ambiguities and nuances of written language in relation to specific, real-life situations and an abstract notion of ‘justice’. In fact, the awareness of this relationship has given rise in recent years to the burgeoning area of critical legal studies, which treats the law as a text to be deconstructed by the critic. Although literary critics have often sought to claim textual interpretation as an activity that marks out the discrete disciplinarity of their subject, this claim is clearly questionable.

THE BIRTH OF ENGLISH

The academic subject of English properly emerged with the birth of the modern, professionalized, research university towards the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when new subjects in the sciences and social sciences were also proliferating and consolidating themselves. When set against the clearly defined aims and quantifiable achievements of these new disciplines, however, English seemed rather woolly and ill-focused. For some, the problem was its reliance on an activity that every educated gentleman was supposed to be doing, or indeed to have done, anyway: becoming acquainted with the great works of literature. In 1887, E.A. Freeman, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, opposed the establishment of an English school there on the grounds that ‘English literature is only chatter about Shelley’, and that ‘we do not want … subjects which are merely light, elegant, interesting. As subjects for examination, we must have subjects in which it is possible to examine’ (Graff 1989: 123; Milner 1996: 4). Precisely the same objections were made against the development of the new subject in America: one college dean, for example, said that he failed to see why a new discipline needed to be created in order to study the books he read on the train to work (Graff 1996: 12). Broadly speaking, English has responded to this impugning of its disciplinary credentials in two ways. First, some professional literary critics have sought to follow the rigid model of other, more established subjects by developing ‘scientific’ approaches with clear procedures and measurable effects. Second, others have made a virtue of the subject’s weak disciplinary base, its fluidity, open-endedness and lack of overall coherence.

Philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and Stephen Toulmin have proposed a distinction between ‘hard’ disciplines in the sciences and ‘soft’ disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which are perceived as being at an early stage of evolutionary development, not yet having attained the status of a fully fledged academic subject. Toulmin, for example, differentiates between ‘compact’, ‘diffuse’ and ‘would-be’ disciplines, which are at various levels of progression towards a state of rigour and internal consistency (1972: 378–95). The English School at Oxford, which was established in 1893, seemed to accept that it lagged behind the more traditional disciplines in this regard. From the beginning, Oxford English tried to make itself ‘compact’, emphasizing linguistic and historical scholarship rather than literary criticism or appreciation, and forging strong links with philology.

Philology is a subject that originated in the classical world but emerged as a modern discipline towards the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in Germany. It involved the close examination of the textual (usually written) sources of past cultures and societies, and could be applied to a wide range of material such as classical, legal, philosophical or historical texts. It was often engaged in establishing the authenticity of archaic or esoteric texts or reconstructing and annotating them from fragmented sources, and was seen as a way of bringing the precision of the new scientific disciplines to bear on textual materials. As the subject developed throughout the nineteenth century, it became more concerned with the science of language in relation to its historical development and established a close relationship with the new discipline of linguistics, although this latter subject tended to emphasize spoken over written texts and examine linguistic structures independent of their historical context. The Oxford English course, along with other English degrees throughout the country, still contains a detailed study of Old English and the history and use of the English language, which is partly a hangover from these earlier efforts to impose the scientific rigour of philology on the new discipline.

Another, ultimately more influential attempt to make English more systematic and methodical was made in the 1920s by I.A. Richards, who succeeded in placing the activity of literary criticism at the centre of the new subject. Richards set his students an ‘unseen’ exercise in which they were asked to evaluate individual poems without knowing the author or the title of the work; the huge range of wildly speculative answers he received convinced him of the need for a new science of interpretation, ‘Practical Criticism’. From the very first sentences of his classic work, Principles of Literary Criticism, which assert that ‘a book is a machine to think with’ and that this particular study is ‘a loom on which it is proposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation’ (Richards 1926: 1), Richards makes clear his dual aim: to turn the practice of textual interpretation into an activity every bit as precise and painstaking as a laboratory experiment, and to use this newly acquired methodology to challenge the dominance of scientific rationality in society. Surveying the current ‘chaos of critical theories’, Richards concludes that literary criticism has no clear theoretical underpinning or modus operandi:

A few conjectures, a supply of admonitions, many acute isolated observations, some brilliant guesses, much oratory and applied poetry, inexhaustible confusion, a sufficiency of dogma, no small stock of prejudices, whimsies and crotchets, a profusion of mysticism, a little genuine speculation, sundry stray inspirations, pregnant hints and aperçus; of such as these, it may be said without exaggeration, is extant critical theory composed.

(Richards 1926: 5–6)

In a later book, Science and Poetry, Richards tries to position literary criticism as a more intellectually demanding alternative to organized religion in an age of the ‘Neutralization of Nature, the transference from the Magical View of the world to the scientific’ (Richards 1935: 52). Science, while greatly improving the material conditions of our lives, provides ‘indifferent and emotionally neutral knowledge’ which ‘can tell us nothing about the nature of things in any ultimate sense’ (Richards 1935: 58). The problem is that other kinds of intellectual inquiry have not kept up with the sciences in structuring and codifying their theories and practices. If the humanities were to achieve this scientificity, then ‘practical consequences might be expected even more remarkable than any that the engineer can contrive’ (Richards 1935: 12). Richards’ counter-response to the ascendancy of the natural sciences in contemporary society, then, is to institute literary studies as a scientific, disciplinary activity.

LITERATURE, LIFE AND THOUGHT

Despite this emphasis on close reading, the study of English at Cambridge, which became massively influential throughout the world through its central figure, F.R. Leavis, was always more interdisciplinary than English at Oxford. When the English School was first established at Cambridge in 1917, the lecturers appointed had been trained in other subjects such as classics, philosophy, history and, in the case of Richards himself, psychoanalysis. As the initial name of its degree, ‘Literature, Life and Thought’, suggests, Cambridge English had an expansiveness and openness to new approaches which were sharply opposed to Oxford’s scholasticism. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was made the first Professor of English in 1912 (in a chair significantly funded by the press baron Sir Harold Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail), and ‘Q’, as he was known, was a jobbing author and newspaper man who had published in a variety of forms: essays, novels, poems and anthologies. Up until the 1920s, the rather quirky Cambridge examination papers reflected his influence, being aimed more at impressionistic and allusive literary appreciation than detailed analysis and requiring students to pitch their work somewhere between scholarly writing and belletristic journalism (MacKillop 1997: 54–7).

F.R. Leavis was radically opposed to Quiller-Couch’s idea of literary studies as a training for belles-lettres, but he retained the notion that it should not be narrowly academic. It is worth reminding ourselves of this, because Leavis is sometimes seen as being a purely textual critic, committed solely to dealing with the ‘words on the page’. While this was certainly an important aspect of his work, he was always interested in context: he had initially embarked on a degree in history, and his 1924 Ph.D. dissertation on ‘the relationship of journalism to literature’ could be said to be a protean version of what later became ‘cultural studies’, in that it dealt with the divide between high- and low-brow culture produced by the entanglement of different modes of writing in the emerging capitalist marketplace.

Leavis disapproved of what he saw as the deadening academicism of the Oxford English School, which ‘expresses itself in compulsory Anglo-Saxon and the naive associated notions of “language” and “discipline”’ (1969: 11–12). Although he certainly drew on Richards’ work to formulate his own techniques of close textual analysis, he also criticized ‘the implication … that “Practical Criticism” was a specialized kind of gymnastic skill to be cultivated and practised as something apart’ (Leavis 1975: 19). In the schools, in particular, as his classroom primer, Culture and Environment (1933), demonstrates, Leavis favoured extending the techniques of practical criticism to such phenomena as advertising, popular newspapers, pulp fiction, book clubs and the literary-heritage industry. His hugely influential journal, Scrutiny, which became one of the prime means for the dissemination of Leavisite views, was also a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, including essays and reviews on the cinema, music, advertising and other forms of popular culture alongside its more conventional literary criticism. Leavis saw literary criticism as a clearly defined but relatively permeable enterprise, peripherally concerned with many other areas of cultural activity, since ‘a real literary interest is an interest in man, society and civilization, and its boundaries cannot be drawn; the adjective is not a circumscribing one’ (Leavis 1972: 200).

Leavis’s ‘Sketch for an English School’, written in 1940 and aimed at redesigning the Cambridge English course, reflected this overall view in its proposal that English students should study a foreign language, comparative literature and political, economic, social and intellectual history alongside the established literary canon (Leavis 1948: 54). In the name of greater interdisciplinarity, Leavis’s hypothetical English degree also included a special subject – the seventeenth century – in which the relationship between literature and society could be studied in more depth. This subject would draw on the fields of sociology, economics, politics and history as well as literature, covering such themes as the civil war, the rise of capitalism, the new sciences and the shifting relations between sophisticated and popular culture (Leavis 1948: 52–4).

These curricular concerns need to be understood in relation to Leavis’s general ideas about the university as an institution. The development of these ideas can be traced at least as far back as the third issue of Scrutiny in 1932, in which he reviews Alexander Meiklejohn’s The Experimental College. Leavis draws on Meiklejohn’s work, which reports on the foundation of a wide-ranging liberal arts course at the University of Wis...

Table of contents

• THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 INTERDISCIPLINARY ENGLISH
• 2 LITERATURE INTO CULTURE
• 3 THEORY AND THE DISCIPLINES
• 4 TEXTS IN HISTORY
• 5 SCIENCE, SPACE AND NATURE
• CONCLUSION
• FURTHER READING
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index