Modern Language Association Defining Interdisciplinarity Author(s): Timothy R. Austin, Alan Rauch, Herbert Blau, George Yudice, Sara van Den Berg, Lillian S. Robinson, Jacqueline Henkel, Timothy Murray, Mark Schoenfield, Valerie Traub, Marianna de Marco Torgovnick Source: PMLA, Vol. 111, No. 2 (Mar., 1996), pp. 271-282 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463106 Accessed: 10/02/2010 19:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Asso ciationis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org
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Defining InterdisciplinarityAuthor(s): Timothy R. Austin, Alan Rauch, Herbert Blau, George Yudice, Sara van Den Berg,Lillian S. Robinson, Jacqueline Henkel, Timothy Murray, Mark Schoenfield, Valerie Traub,Marianna de Marco TorgovnickSource: PMLA, Vol. 111, No. 2 (Mar., 1996), pp. 271-282Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463106
Accessed: 10/02/2010 19:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
FORTY-TWO eadersof PMLA esponded o a call forcommentson the
extent to which interdisciplinary goals in literary studies have been
achieved. The statements are arranged in four sections: Defining Interdisciplin-
arity, The Role of Theory, Enumerating the Obstacles, and Perspectives fromParticular Fields. Below is a list of contributors:
BeverlyAllen 308
DerekAttridge 284
TimothyR. Austin 271
SusanBalee 289
CynthiaGoldin Bernstein 306
HerbertBlau 274
DanielBoyarin 290
JonathanBoyarin 288
MarkBracher 300
EdCohen 288JeffreyJeromeCohen 283
PaulJ. Contino 309
Stanley Corngold 286
AnnCvetkovich 292
MariaI. Duke dos Santos 291
David Graver 307
John C. Hawley 283
JacquelineHenkel 278
MargaretR. Higonnet 298
KathrynMontgomeryHunter 303
Claire Kahane 301
KennethJ. Knoespel 304
Millicent Lenz 305
John Lowe 294
JulietFlowerMacCannell 295
FedwaMalti-Douglas 311
TimothyMurray279
HermanRapaport285
Alan Rauch 273
LillianS. Robinson 277
HenryM. Sayre 283MarkSchoenfieldand
ValerieTraub 280
Sidonie Smith 293
MadelonSprengnether302
MariannaDe MarcoTorgovnick282
Mario J. Vald6s 299
LynneVallone 297
Sara van den Berg 276
KathrynVanSpanckeren296
GeorgeYddice 275
ClarisseZimra 291
DefiningInterdisciplinarity
For at least two decades, "interdisciplinary" has ranked high among the acco-
lades that educators accord their colleagues' work. The term is both pervasiveand seductive. Granting agencies frequently set aside special funds for interdis-
ciplinary proposals, and college recruiters highlight interdisciplinary projects on
their campuses in addressing high school prospects. After all, interdisciplinarity
suggests collegiality, flexibility, collaboration, and
scholarlybreadth-the academy's equivalents o parent-
hood andapple pie.Unfortunately, nterdisciplinarityand its implied an-
tithesis, (intra)disciplinarity, efy absolute definition as
intellectual concepts; their meanings are at best provi-sionalandinstitutionallydependent. n this respect, theyresemble the fickle deictic modifiers this and that. A
speakerwho refers to a Rolls-Royce as thisfantastic car
while passing it in a parkinglot will adjustafter pro-
ceeding only a few spacesdown the line-it is now that
fantastic car. Analogously, scholars constantly adapttheir definitions of interdisciplinarityto fit the various
institutional ontexts from whichthey speak.
As a graduate tudent n a department f linguisticsinthe 1970s,I regarded inguisticsas an autonomousdisci-
pline. Wholly contained subdisciplines included pho-
nology, syntax, and semantics; interdisciplinarywork
generally occupied "hyphenated"ields such as psycho-,neuro-, and sociolinguistics. Withinthis framework,I
chose to pursueresearch n stylistics,whichmy advisers
and I saw as an unhyphenated ut nonetheless nterdisci-
plinary area situated between linguistics and literarystudies. True,stylistics could claim at least a fifty-yearexistence as an independentfield of study, and it sup-
portedseveralspecialist journals. But at thattime there
existed neither an active professionalorganizationdedi-catedsolely to stylistics nordepartments r programs n
stylistic studies,either of which mighthave served to le-
gitimatethe field as a disciplinein its own right. (Today,of course,theemergenceof theInternationalAssociation
forLiterarySemanticsand of academicprograms uch as
the Programmen LiteraryLinguisticsat the Universityof Strathclyde, n Scotland,might lead one to the oppo-site conclusion.Thisdevelopmentalone demonstrates he
highly provisionalstatusof disciplinarydesignation.)After taking my doctorate, I accepted an assistant
professorship n an English department,whereI was as-
signedto introductoryinguisticscoursesvirtually denti-cal in content o thoseI hadtaughtas a graduate ssistant.
Now, however,those courses functioned institutionallynotas introductions or studentsembarkingon a linguis-tics majorbut instead as electives that offered "an inter-
I then served for severalyears as directorof the uni-
versity'sLinguisticsStudiesProgram,a unitclassified as
one of three interdisciplinaryprograms,the other two
being Women's Studies andAfro-AmericanStudies. In
thisinstance nterdisciplinary ctedmerelyas a synonymfor
interdepartmentaldepartmentaltatus
itself havingbeen settled a priori).
MeanwhileI had gravitated o the MLA Division on
LinguisticApproaches o Literature, ne of thirteensub-
sumed under the broad banner of InterdisciplinaryAp-proaches. The titles of some divisions in this groupcombine literature with other well-established disci-
on Women's Studies and on EthnicStudies,by contrast,do not link paired disciplines in thatway.Literature nd
Science and Literatureand OtherArts both relate liter-
ary studies to "superdisciplines,"areas considerablywider than might usually qualify as disciplines. And
Children'sLiteraturedenotes a subdisciplineof literary
studyrather han aninterdisciplinaryield at all.However,the apparentlyrandomassignmentsto this
group turnout to have a perfectly cogent institutional
basis. The MLA employsas the primarybasis for classi-
fying its eighty or so divisions either the language in
which literarytexts are writtenor, where thatlanguageis English, the nationalityof theirauthors: he divisions
on American iterature ormone group,followed alpha-
betically by thoseon English,French,German,Hispanic,andItalian iteratures,and thenby the groupOtherLan-
guages and Literatures. A collection of divisions in
Comparative tudieschallengestheMLA'sprimary las-
sification by crossing languageboundaries;another setcovers work more usefully classified in terms of genre.And for topic areas that arenonliterary,he MLA offers
divisionsin LanguageStudies andin Teaching.Given such an organizationalgrid, it is easy to see
how InterdisciplinaryApproachesshould have come to
encompass a miscellany of divisions that would other-
wise have had no home. Even an areasuch as children's
literature-in which the basic materials and methods
useddifferverylittle fromthoseappropriateo, say, studyof the English Romantic period-becomes interdisci-
plinary by default when it fails to fit anywhere else in
the MLA architecture.The evidence is overwhelming, then, that interdis-
ciplinarityconstitutes not an inherentcharacteristicof
an article, book, course, or research programbut the
byproductof a highly contingentsystem of intellectual
categorizationwhose form is dictatedby locally specificinstitutional orces.This conclusion n turnentailsa com-
mitment o threepartiallyoverlappingprinciples.First, t
suggeststhat the epithet nterdisciplinaryhould be used
neither to lionize colleagues norto disparage hem,nei-
ther to elevate theirwork nor to marginalize t. Scholar-
ship maybe praised or its originality,nsight,coherence,
or thoroughness,but interdisciplinaritydoes not belongon any such list of criteria.Second, scholarsneed con-
Inmany ways theprofession'ssense of interdisciplinarityhas notchanged verymuchin recentyears.In spiteof or
perhapsbecause of currentpractices n highereducation,which emphasize the narrowspecialization needed for
disciplinaryinquiry,the figureof the eclectic polymathas a modelfor interdisciplinaritys stillpredominant. he
figureis dangerousbecause it inherentlyvalidatesdisci-
plinaryboundariesand suggests thatinterdisciplinarityhas more to do with capacity and retention than with
synthesisandanalysis.As interdisciplinaryields such as those thatcombine
literature nd science (the areaI know best, as coordina-
torof the Program n Science, Technology,and Cultureat GeorgiaInstituteof Technology) have grown, so has
the dilemma of avoiding the reificationof conventional
boundarieswhile resisting the self-congratulatorytoneof the polymath.Both tasksaredifficultgiven the over-
whelminginfluenceof science andtechnology in socialand academicdiscourse. It is hard to resist the impulseto use "interdisciplinarity"now a buzzwordacross the
curriculum)o reassert he importanceof the humanitiesin universities
ncreasinglydriven
bytechnicalandvoca-
tional imperatives.No matterhow well intentioned, his
strategy is misguided not merely because it reinforcesthehierarchyof disciplinesbut also because it implicitlysuggests that interdisciplinaryprogramsare important
primarilybecause of the service role they play for more
establishedprogramsn science andengineering.Even the most well-intentioned colleagues imagine
thatliterature-and-sciencerogramsareessentiallyelab-orateforaysinto technicalcommunication,with a minordose of literarystudies to give students the appropriateculturalveneer.The popular image of interdisciplinaryprogramsthus often fails to encompass a full sense of
whatbeinginterdisciplinarymight actuallymean.
The problemis partlytaxonomic."Interdisciplinary"
suggests an almost mechanical linkage between disci-
plines,whenin fact all the differentmodesof intellectualinquiry it into a culturalmatrix hatisn'teasily mapped.Needless to say,theforcednatureof thecopulain "litera-
tureandscience" is no better.Other erms, ike"infradis-
program n science, technology,andculture, t met with
some resistance because to colleagues in otherdepart-ments the title wordsseemedtoo disparate o be linked.It has been our practiceto describe the degree as "cul-
turalstudiesof science andtechnology,"a phrasing hat
seems more sensitive to the spirit of what we do thanotherterms.
Thecultural tudiesof scienceandtechnologyencom-
passes the idea that all forms of culturalexpression in-
fluenceandareinfluencedby the otherforms. And while
hardly a remarkableinsight, the idea means compre-
to its very methodologies, is subject to social and cul-
tural nfluences.
The response to this emerging concept of interdis-
ciplinarityhas not always been pleasant.In Higher Su-
perstition, for example, Paul Gross and NormanLevitt
cantankerouslydefend the sanctityof science andtech-
nology fromcriticalscrutiny hat stems fromany source
but the discipline itself. Using the "social constructionof science" as a universal
bogeyman, theywarnthatun-
qualifiedbarbariansare at the gates of science andthatthe sole aim of these "intruders" s vandalismand de-struction. Yet if annihilation is on anyone's mind, itseems to be on the scientists'.GrossandLevitt ndulgea
fantasy that involves successfully replacingthe facultyof a humanitiesdepartmentwith autodidact readpoly-math)scientistswho could "patch ogether"a functionalhumanitiesdepartment. t is difficultto imagine a more
perverseor cynical view of interdisciplinarity;yet, as Ihave tried to suggest, the very limitation of the termen-ables so outrageousa claim.The barbarianso be fearedare the dilettanteswho can construeinterdisciplinarityso simplistically.
ties of the sententious,ora languageof "performativity"thatwill outwit, baffle, or abolish the regulatoryfunc-
tionsthatwork nthe name of the law.Thespacein which
this is to be accomplishedis an affective "in-between,"where subversionis second natureand the model of in-
surgencyis the diasporic agency of those who have suf-
feredthe depredationsof historybutmanaged-throughthe lore of displacement or fragmentation,its aporeticmurmursor marginalnoise-to keep the struggle goingand academicscharged.
If there is "a mode of minimum rationality"whose
versatilityof articulationnotonly has survivalpowerbut
also changes the subject of culture (Homi K. Bhabha,"PostcolonialAuthorityand PostmodernGuilt,"Cultural
ing back on itself, escape the positivism it deplores-canons of judgment, rules of evidence, and, despite
postmodernism'sdevastating critique of authority,the
questionof authoritynevertheless. Whatever he appar-
entlyborderless
energy acquiredin
passingfrom the
insularityof the literary ext through hepoliticaluncon-
scious to the propheticvoice of the wide worlddreamingon things to come, the validationof knowledge-wher-
everit comes from,out of the libraryor off the streets-remains the principal issue of interdisciplinarity,as it
was forL6vi-Straussn "thescience of the concrete."
Asking who is doing the validating is sometimes as
muchan evasionof the issue as a definitionof it, thoughsometimes too the insistence may come from an un-
accreditedsource,as it did many years ago for me in an
affectivein-between,which remains n memoryas a cau-
tionarytale. My firstdegree was in chemical engineer-
ing, and my first book, on my work in the theater (in
which I starteda career while completinga doctorate n
Englishand Americanliterature),had a chapterentitled
"GrowingUp withEntropy";he title crossed one of thegospels of the 1960s, Paul Goodman'sGrowingUpAb-
surd,with an unresolvedfascination for that ratherdis-
tressing conceptof the second law of thermodynamics.had studied that law at a time when it was possible to
solve all problems atleaston exams)with almost no the-
oreticalunderstandingf whatentropywas,thoughI had
a premonitionthat it wasn't very good. It wasn't until I
began to study literature and thought about Hamlet,EmmaBovary, hebaldspotonVronsky'shead,BartlebytheScrivener,Didi andGogo,or the Eliotic versionof the
knowledges and ideological differences-what is beingsettled on instead s a new set of categorical mperatives.
I certainlywon't tell PatBuchanan,but this developmentputsa quite limiting damperon the debates,even whenwe're urgedto teach them. And though over the entire
spectrumof cultural studies all areurgedto historicize,thereis one dominant heorizationof history, nto whichall the talk of histories is accommodated. The knowl-
edge that seems to be falling between the cracks herere-
mains withhistorianswho arelargelyunread.
The legitimacy of crossingor hybridizingdisciplinesis not so much in questionanymorebut the claims beingmadein a crisis of authoritywith therhetoricaboutsub-
versions and transgressions while invisible power is
laughing upits sleeve.
Meanwhile,the
"heat death" ofentropyhas takenanother urn,a sort of clinamen in the
void, into chaos theory, where the laws of physics areseen less as laws thanas functionalreductions thatper-mitone to thinkaboutcomplex systems, like that of late
capitalism,whose realityis neithera logic nor a law but
allowingfor the suffusion of disparateknowledgethat isin some finalanalysis,as WallaceStevensmight say, theweatherof itself, what is precipitatedas weather ornot)may arise fromincrementalvariantsof the most unfore-seeablekind,withchancehaving"the astfeaturingblowat events," as in the mat-weaving sequence of Moby-Dick. This is not to yield all of reality to the aleatoric,
only to recognize thatwhen inquirymoves from a sub-
ject position to an institutional or global scale-with
mission,andtransnationalinance,and wheredecoloniza-tion is matchedby resurgingnationalismswith obduratehistories-then the capacityto thinkaboutrealityacross
disciplinaryandculturalbordersrequires omething essformulaicthan the going historicism or the mantrason
power arisingfrom an overdose of Foucault. In this re-gard,in between,there is still a leak in the universe.
HERBERTBLAU
Universityof Wisconsin,Milwaukee
A political analysisof disciplinaryand interdisciplinaryknowledgecouldnotbe moretimely as theUnitedStates
universityundergoesprofoundchangesin the 1990s. Atthe beginnings of the cold war era, linguistic, literary,and culturalinstruction in American studies, areapro-grams in Soviet studies, and Latin American studies
emergedas partof aneffortto fomentbotha new articu-
lation of American traditionsand an understandingofthepotential roublespotsfor UnitedStatesworlddomi-
nance. The struggles of the social movements of the1960s andearly 1970s also helpedusher n interdisciplin-aryprogramsn women'sstudies,blackstudies,Chicano
studies, andgay andlesbian studies.These fields intro-ducedanalyticalcategoriessuch as gender,race,sexual-
ity, imperialism, and colonialism that cut across the
disciplinesandenabledthediscernment f objectswhoseformulationand studypointedto the political stakes oftheepistemological enterprise.
Institutionalizedin partas a form of crisis manage-mentby thegovernmentn the 1970s,theseprogramsarenow fending off the assault of the conservative turnin
UnitedStatespolitics.Theirpredicaments compoundedby the availability of new forms of inter-or transdisci-
plinarity, uch as multicultural ndcultural tudies.Withthe waningof affirmativeactionandotherGreatSocietyprograms,boardsof trustees anduniversityadministra-tions can moreeasily justify cuttingethnic studiespro-
gramsorfoldingthem intocultural tudiesprogramshat
presumablyaddress ssues of raceandgenderwhile en-
joying wide popularityand a solid marketshare injour-nals,universitypress publications,andthe media.
According to a recentreport,areastudies programsarealso destinedfor cutbacks f not outrightelimination
now thatthe cold warthat ustifiedthemhas ended.Be-cause theywere seen as crucial to nationalsecurity,evenresearchthat "hadno identifiable relationship to coldwarconcerns"was supported StanleyJ. Heginbotham,
"RethinkingInternationalScholarship,"Items 48.2-3
[1994]: 33-40; 34). Fundersnow give priorityto suchissues as ethnicrivalriesandthe negotiationof diversityin civil society, the understandingof nationalisms and
religious fundamentalisms,he transition o democracy,and other factors crucial to the development (or hin-
drance)of marketsand market nstitutions(William H.
Honan,"TheQuadrangleBecomes a Globe,"New YorkTimes6 Nov.
1994,sec. 4A:
14+).Cultureand
diversityare growing in popularityin the humanities and social
sciences, not only because United States demographictrendsrequirea rearticulationf national dentitybutalsobecausesocial scienceandbusinessprograms re"focus-
[ing] scholarlyattentionon issues of ethnicity,religion,andlanguage"(Heginbotham37). A recenttextbookon
global marketing highlights the "culturalvalues thatmake [marketing echniques]useful in formulating tra-
tegic plans and programs in the global marketplace"(RichardL. Sandheusen,GlobalMarketing Hauppauge:Barron's,1994] 99). Drawingon a rangeof research ntonationaland local cultures,this marketingapproachat-
ketplaceas a wayof capturing ndretaininganexpanding
rangeof consuming publicshas affected trends n educa-tion andemployment-not only the emergenceof MBA
and other training programsin global business but the
transformationsn the United Statesuniversitysystemas
a whole. That "Americaneducationneeds to go global"means "internationalizinghe curriculum" thome, par-
ticularly n elite institutions hat will developthe expen-sive interdisciplinaryprogramsto give their students a
competitiveadvantage n the global marketplace. t also
means that well-off foreign studentswill help maintain
the financialhealth and influence of United Statesgrad-uateprogramsat elite institutions Honan15).
Interdisciplinaryprogramsat public colleges, whileimportantor achievingunderstandingf a multicultural,multiracial ociety, will prepare tudents at best forjobsin the middle levels of the ever-growingservice sector.
The programsmayalso help trimthe size of facultiesas
interdisciplinaritydoes double and even triple duty in
StephenMitchell, who is redefiningthe psychoanalyticsituationas a meetingof the "multipleselves" of analystand analysand;and Stanley J.Coen, who offers a rela-
tional theoryof writingandreading.The new relational
paradigmis a significant advance beyond the object-relationstheoryand the Lacanianlinguistic theorystill
prominent n the work of many psychoanalytic literarycritics. At the same time, however, literarycritics have
gone beyond most psychoanalytic theorists in under-
Freud'swritingswithcarefulattention o the psychicand
rhetorical ources of theirstyle.A numberof literary rit-
ics since NormanHolland and Steven Marcus(includingSkura andMahony) have completed formal trainingin
psychoanalysis, despite strong oppositionfrompsycho-analysts who fear the trivialization of their field asjustanotherkind of interpretation.Others,like me, havenot
completedsuchstudybut are fortunate o workwithpsy-
choanalysts who generously instructliterarycritics in
theirpersonalexperienceof psychoanalysis,but the ex-
penseof analysisand of psychoanalytic andidacymakes
both kindsof trainingdifficultfor manyscholars to un-
dertake.I do not know of any psychoanalystswho have
subsequentlyundertakendoctoral studies in literature,althoughthe curriculum n severalpsychoanalyticinsti-
tutes is being altered o include the perspectivesof other
disciplines. At the Seattle Institute for Psychoanalysis,forexample, first-year andidatesare asked n whatways
theymightconsider an analysanda text to be read. Inter-
disciplinarycenters for research, ike those at New York
University,the Universityof Florida,and the State Uni-
versityof New York,Buffalo,facilitateongoingwork and
communicationthroughconferences, publications,and
Internetbulletinboards.In otherplaces, scholarsrely on
informal discussion groups and personal friendships.Most
often, interdisciplinaryourses are
developedand
taughtwithin established departments.In such depart-ments,interdisciplinaryworkmaybe regardedas a radi-
cal challenge,thenaccepted,then dismissed.
I believe thatpractitionersof every discipline live in
the same moment and are moved to ask the same ques-tions, albeit framed in their own vocabularies. Rightnow, a major concern in our society is violence, both
publicandprivate,rootedin a sense of lost relationshipsand lost agency.Not surprisingly,here has been a resur-
genceof interestamongpsychoanalystshere and n SouthAmerica in the work of Melanie Klein, the preeminent
ers, theorists, and critics of literatureare also trying to
address these issues in classrooms and in research.
Whetheror not these two disciplineschoose to collabo-
rate,theircommoninterests,hopes,and fears will be ob-vious to an observera hundredyearsfromnow.
SARAVANDENBERG
Universityof Washington
In the prehistoryof feminist culturalstudies-by which
I mean certainstunning ntellectualmoves thatprecededthe introduction f feministwork ntotheacademy-therestandtwo monumental tudies,VirginiaWoolf's A Room
of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second
Sex,both modelsof original nquiry ntothe female con-
dition and of interdisciplinary pproaches o that nquiry.A work of imaginative literature,A Room of One's
Own begins with the implied question, What about
women and fiction? In order to get to her famous con-
clusion, at once material and cultural, that a woman
needs five hundredpoundsa yearand a roomof herown
to writefiction,Woolfhas to learnwhat amount o alien
tongues, includingthe discourses of history,economics,andsociology. Beauvoir,also a womanof letters,exam-
ology, and fiction to articulate for the first time the
theorynow calledthe social constructionof gender.
Although the ideological and institutional barriersthese two womenencounteredwere formidable,at least
no departmenthead told Woolf to keep off otherdisci-
plines' turf or thatliterarystudycould not accommodate
herquestion,Why arewomenpoor?No committee chair
said to Beauvoirthat the questionwhetherone is bornor
becomes a womanis settled n the deliveryroom,not the
philosopher'sstudy.
By contrast,a feministcriticin the academy todayat-
tempting,howevermodestly,to follow the trailsblazed
by Woolf andBeauvoir runsheadlonginto the walls es-
tablishedby her own and otherdisciplines,each with its
characteristic object of study, research methods, anddiscursive practices. Indeed, bringingfeminist studies
into the academy has entailed a confrontation with the
traditionalorganizationof knowledge into disciplines."What s this?"I used to be askedaboutmy earlywork.
"It'snot literature,t's-it's sociology "Andsociologistsfelt free to dismiss the same work as hopelessly tainted
by belles lettres.
Nonetheless, the institutional barriers hatdeterminewhether t is possiblefor suchworkto be carriedon atallareinsignificantnext to thebarriersn my mind,echoingthe internalvoice thatWoolfcalled theangelin the houseand thatshe heardcautioningrestraintn criticism of the
patriarchy.The angel I hear-who soundsmore like the
will mergewith neighboringdisciplinesor absorbthem.
How mightwe otherwise magine nterdisciplinary ork?
Most often andobviously our interdisciplinaryprojectsborrowfrom nearbyfields. But being interdisciplinarycould also mean collaborating piecemeal among disci-
plines on some subsumingbutpartitionedproject.More
can be adapted o emergentsocial andpoliticalconsider-
ations.Conversely, s it intellectually prudent o assume
thatemergentfields have little to glean from the disci-
plinarymethods andlegacies now undersuspicion?Forexample,cinemastudies,which is particularlyn-
terdisciplinaryn practice,has witnessed a growingsus-
picion about psychoanalysis, one of the disciplines to
which it has been theoreticallyindebted.Even scholars
workingoutside this field have heardthe call to dismiss
psychoanalysis or favoringphantasmatic eneralityover
historicalparticularityandfor being historicallyhostile
or indifferent o a wide rangeof identitypositions,espe-
cially those withfeminist, racial,queer,andpostcolonialinflections. These criticismsderive from the understand-
able concern thatspecific film practiceswill be reduced
to somethinglike a masterdiscourse of psychoanalysis.But they are also based on the questionableassumptionthat cinematic analysis can easily distinguish politicsfromfantasy, orcefromdesire,and cinemafrompsycho-
blind to the historical bases of interdisciplinaritytself.
Is it even possible to dissociate clearlythe historical de-
velopmentof the modern institutions of psychoanalysisandcinema?Haven't bothdisciplinesbeen complicitousin borrowing rom each other to help mapthe modernist
parametersof female and male subjectivityand sexual-
ity? And haven't relatedconceptualizationsof perspec-
tive, hallucination,visualization,moving images, voice,and echo been crucialto both? Forinstance,contempo-
how cinematic flashback and hallucinatory projection
are conjoined in the genderedrepresentation ndanaly-sis of trauma.
Openness to interdisciplinary reciprocity can also
work to the advantageof psychoanalysis, which all too
frequently ontrasts hepathosof theunresolved llnessesof its patients with the bathos of artistic creativity and
sublimation.In makingthatcontrast,the psychoanalystremains indifferent to the psychosocial structures and
traumas f cinematicandliterary epresentation,isualityandtextuality,to which Freud was drawnfor guidancein understandinghe enigmasof psychicalpresentation.
Turning eciprocally o examplesof the cinematicandlit-
throughreferenceto otherterms; he slidingof the chainof signification s notjust the slippagebetweensignifierandsignifiedbut also the meaning-producingmovement
that occursthrough he frames of disciplinarity.
If, as Derridaargues, he law of genre requires ts own
contamination, he law of discipline equally dependson
the unacknowledgedpermeabilityof its boundaries.Be-
cause disciplines are in continual transformation, it
is inadequate, for example, to use a legal text such as
Blackstone's Commentaries o gloss a referencein By-ron's Don Juan to contract law, because the two texts
wereengagedin a widerpolitical struggleoverthe mean-
ing of public agreements; his struggle shaped,and con-tinues to shape, law, literature, legal scholarship, and
literarycriticism. Alternatively,to understand he legalcontext for Shakespeare's Othello requires thinkingabout how criminal law has been shaped by readers-
usually admirers-of Shakespeare(several Tennessee
legal opinions in murderappealsquote Shakespeareto
justify their narrative).This recursive dynamic marks
the political and intellectualnecessity of a historicizing
interdisciplinarity that regards the construction and
maintenanceof the disciplinesas partof the meaningsof
texts-even those texts that seem most comfortablynes-
tled in the realm of the aesthetic.Certain opics andquestionsare morevisibly marked
thanothers by the disciplinary wars that result in their
current ntelligibility.Forexample, the effort to analyzetherepresentationf lesbianism s hamperedby the dom-
inance of one discourse-psychoanalysis-in the crea-
tion of the object of inquiry.This dominancegives rise
to several strategies: to reconstitute the lesbian within
the terms of psychoanalysis; to scuttle psychoanalysis
altogether(butthatleaves the historythatgave rise to it
intact);or to performa genealogy of the diacritical for-
mation of both psychoanalysis and lesbianism. But the
pointremains that the
disciplinaryboundaryis as
pro-nounced around he lesbian as it is aroundpsychoanaly-sis. Orthe invisibilityof the objectmaybe enactedby its
dispersal across disciplines. The representationof the
humanbody, for instance,has been parceledamong lit-
erature,history,philosophy,the visual arts,and the sci-
ences; in a sense, to refuse to engage with the body's
interdisciplinaritys to reproducets dismemberment.
Both of us-an early moderngender theorist and a
British romanticist-are concerned about the specific
conceptual boundaries we confront in our individual
projects.One limit, however,circumscribesus both: the
construction,reading,andutilization of evidence. As a
scholarworks in the interstices of history,science, law,
visual arts,andliterature,evidentiaryclaims (as well as
theirdismissal)tend to police intellectualmovement; his
policingcan take the form of reifyingcertain ruth laimswhile not adequatelyproblematizingthe methodologythatproduced hem. Recourse to "rulesof evidence" ails
to account for the extent to which the adjudicationof
claims is a disciplinary formation.Not only does each
discipline constructits own criteriaof proof, but what
counts as proof is itself contested within, as well as
across,disciplines.To understandhis contest in histori-
cal terms is the crux of interdisciplinarity.Ratherthan
use presumptivestandardsof admissibility to discredit
speculative work, we need to ask how a matrix of evi-
dence gainsconsensus,by means of which criteriaof in-
clusion and exclusion. By what means is evidence readas symptomatic of an "event"? To the extent that the
conceptof evidence is a scientificor legal paradigm,how
does evidence in those discourses depend on literary,historical,andreligiouspresuppositions?
Pressuring he status of evidenceby means of such a
rentconfigurationsof proof. It might be useful to sup-
plantthe epistemological privilegeof evidence with that
of the predictive hypothesis:If we hypothesizeX, what
do we bringto light thatmightotherwise have been oc-
cluded?Using predictive hypotheses provisionally is a
tenuous,enablingformof scholarshipthat demands in-tellectualgenerosity.The payoff is the foregroundingof
evidenceas a circular,accretiveconstructioncontingenton historicalselectivityanddisciplinarycriteria.
Theexistenceof differentparadigmsof proofcontrib-
utes to the lack of protocolsforengagingin dialogueand
to the difficultyof translatingacrossdisciplines. These
paradigmsn turngive rise to the illusion thatwhileone's
own field is fractured,contradictory,and riven, other
fieldsarestable,coherent,andopento untroubled xpor-tation. Whenwe turnto an eighteenth-century egal text
for a notion of marriage, or instance,and learnthatit is
an "economicunionoriginalto civil society"(TheLaws
respectingWomen,1777),we should notacceptthis defi-
nition as a gloss on the marriageplot oras a statementof
the way things were or as an irrelevancy o the aesthetic
expressionof desire.Rather,we shouldexploreas politi-cal conflict and rhetoricalpositioning the heteroglossic
productionof whatmarriagewill, always provisionallyandpartially,have meant.Analogously,when we speakof interdisciplinarityn the presenttense, we do so with
little sense of how certainsubjectsremain nconceivable
because of currentdisciplinary configurations. High-
critiquetheirguidingterms,is a crucialchallenge posed
by interdisciplinarityoday.
MARK SCHOENFIELD
VanderbiltUniversity
VALERIETRAUB
VanderbiltUniversityand
University f Michigan
Every discipline has rules and limitations of its own-
certain ways of doing things, both for better and for
worse.Interdisciplinarytudyworksbecausepeoplefrom
one discipline are not routinely bound by the same as-
sumptionsas people fromanother.Theydo not necessar-
ily sharethe sameblindspots, focus on the same things,or thinkaboutproblems n the same way.So, often, theycan see through he assumptions hatgroundother disci-
plines so thoroughlythat the assumptionshavebecome
invisible axioms. People from anotherdisciplinecan un-
derstandproblems-and, sometimes, reachsolutions-
in a new orcogent way.Inotherwords, nterdisciplinarity
brings with it the benefits of defamiliarization. It can
break hrough o powerful nsights.
Interdisciplinarysuccess stories abound.One is the
perceptionof narrativityn Freud'scase studiesor, from
a differentangle, the perceptionof his vexed and illogi-cal ideas aboutwomen,which are often the result of met-
aphoric thinking gone wild. Another is the broadeningof arthistory from its traditional preoccupationswith
artistic genealogies and iconographyto include issues
like race and gender.A thirdis the arrivalof poststruc-turalistrelativism n anthropology.
Literarystudies has played an importantrole in all
these developments.It was unlikely, to give one exam-
ple, that a trainedpsychologistwould havethoughtabout
Freudas a storytelleror a masterof metaphor;bothper-
ceptionswere natural or literarycritics.Interdisciplinar-
ity has enhancedthe powerandprestige,not to mentionthe availablesubjectmatter,of my discipline-importantbenefits of interdisciplinary studies to members of
the MLA.
Not all the gifts of interdisciplinarityareunambigu-ous, nor are all uniformlywelcome.Someethnographers,for example, don't want to hear how poststructuralism
compromisesthe validityof theirfindings. They equate
poststructuralismwith self-consciousness or narcissism.
It mightbe healthier or them to pointoutthatethnogra-
phy has addressed the issue of culturalrelativism for a
long time, for example, in the work of Franz Boas. In
fact, too few literary theorists have bothered to readfoundationalbooksin anthropology,whichoften address
gantfor scholars n fields like postcolonialstudies not to
know andacknowledgelandmark exts in anthropologythat raiseandilluminatekey questions.Interdisciplinaryscholarsneed to fill in gaps like these. In the same way,
interdisciplinarycritics in literatureand theorydepart-ments need to learn more about statistical documenta-
tion, interviewing and sampling techniques, and fields
thatrequirespecial expertise, ike mathandmusic.
But there is no getting away frominterdisciplinarity,evenin thewaypeoplewrite.Manydisciplines-ethnog-
raphy,history,andliterarycriticism-are being affected
by impulses toward narrativeand memoir in scholarly
writing.To some extent,such trendsare a productof the
prestigeof
literarytudies.Mostof
all, perhaps, heyare
the result of an increased interestin crossover writing,not just among scholars but also among the university
pressesand tradehouses thatpublishthem. But suchim-
pulses partlyderive frominterdisciplinaritytself. When
writingcrossesdisciplines,scholarscannotcount on cap-tive or built-in audiences.Prose has to be accessible to
people who are not longtime specialists. Termsmust be