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 and Marianna de Marco Torgovnick
Source: PMLA, Vol. 111, No. 2 (Mar., 1996), pp. 271-282
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 Forum

PMLA invites members of the asso- FORTY-TWO readers of PMLA responded to a call for comments on the
ciation to submit letters, typed extent to which interdisciplinary goals in literary studies have been
achieved. The statements are arranged in four sections: Defining Interdisciplin-
and double-spaced, commenting on
arity, The Role of Theory, Enumerating the Obstacles, and Perspectives from
articles in previous issues or on Particular Fields. Below is a list of contributors:
matters of general scholarly or crit-
ical interest. The editor reserves the Beverly Allen 308 Kenneth J. Knoespel 304
right to reject or edit Forum contri- Derek Attridge 284 Millicent Lenz 305

Timothy R. Austin 271 John Lowe 294

butions and offers the authors dis-
Susan Balee 289 Juliet Flower MacCannell 295
cussed an opportunity to reply to
Cynthia Goldin Bernstein 306 Fedwa Malti-Douglas 311
the letters published. Occasionally Herbert Blau 274 Timothy Murray 279
the Forum contains letters on topics Daniel Boyarin 290 Herman Rapaport 285
of broad interest written and sub- Jonathan Boyarin 288 Alan Rauch 273
Mark Bracher 300 Lillian S. Robinson 277
mitted at the editor's request. The
EdCohen 288 Henry M. Sayre 283
journal omits titles before persons'
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen 283 Mark Schoenfield and
names, discouragesfootnotes, and Valerie Traub 280
Paul J. Contino 309
regrets that it cannot consider any Sidonie Smith 293
Stanley Corngold 286
letter of more than one thousand Ann Cvetkovich 292 Madelon Sprengnether 302
words. Letters should be addressed Maria I. Duke dos Santos 291 Marianna De Marco Torgovnick 282
David Graver 307 Mario J. Vald6s 299
to PMLA Forum, Modern Language
John C. Hawley 283 Lynne Vallone 297
Association, 10 Astor Place, New
Jacqueline Henkel 278 Sara van den Berg 276
York, NY 10003-6981.
Margaret R. Higonnet 298 Kathryn VanSpanckeren 296
Kathryn Montgomery Hunter 303 George Yddice 275
Claire Kahane 301 Clarisse Zimra 291

Defining Interdisciplinarity

For at least two decades, "interdisciplinary" has ranked high among the acco-
lades that educators accord their colleagues' work. The term is both pervasive
and 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

271

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272 Forum

suggests collegiality, flexibility, collaboration, and Meanwhile I had gravitated to the MLA Division on
scholarly breadth-the academy's equivalents to parent- Linguistic Approaches to Literature, one of thirteen sub-
hood and apple pie. sumed under the broad banner of Interdisciplinary Ap-
Unfortunately, interdisciplinarity and its implied an- proaches. The titles of some divisions in this group
tithesis, (intra)disciplinarity, defy absolute definition as combine literature with other well-established disci-
intellectual concepts; their meanings are at best provi- plines-for example, Anthropological Approaches to
Literature, Philosophical Approaches to Literature, and
sional and institutionally dependent. In this respect, they
resemble the fickle deictic modifiers this and that. A Psychological Approaches to Literature. The Divisions
speaker who refers to a Rolls-Royce as thisfantastic oncarWomen's Studies and on Ethnic Studies, by contrast,
while passing it in a parking lot will adjust after pro-
do not link paired disciplines in that way. Literature and
ceeding only a few spaces down the line-it is now Science
that and Literature and Other Arts both relate liter-
fantastic car. Analogously, scholars constantly adapt ary studies to "superdisciplines," areas considerably
wider than might usually qualify as disciplines. And
their definitions of interdisciplinarity to fit the various
institutional contexts from which they speak. Children's Literature denotes a subdiscipline of literary
As a graduate student in a department of linguistics in rather than an interdisciplinary field at all.
study
the 1970s, I regarded linguistics as an autonomous disci-
However, the apparently random assignments to this
pline. Wholly contained subdisciplines included pho-
group turn out to have a perfectly cogent institutional
nology, syntax, and semantics; interdisciplinary work
basis. The MLA employs as the primary basis for classi-
fying its eighty or so divisions either the language in
generally occupied "hyphenated" fields such as psycho-,
neuro-, and sociolinguistics. Within this framework,
whichI literary texts are written or, where that language
chose to pursue research in stylistics, which my advisers
is English, the nationality of their authors: the divisions
and I saw as an unhyphenated but nonetheless interdisci-
on American literature form one group, followed alpha-
plinary area situated between linguistics and literary betically by those on English, French, German, Hispanic,
studies. True, stylistics could claim at least a fifty-year
and Italian literatures, and then by the group Other Lan-
existence as an independent field of study, and it guages
sup- and Literatures. A collection of divisions in
ported several specialist journals. But at that time there
Comparative Studies challenges the MLA's primary clas-
sification by crossing language boundaries; another set
existed neither an active professional organization dedi-
cated solely to stylistics nor departments or programs in work more usefully classified in terms of genre.
covers
stylistic studies, either of which might have served to le-for topic areas that are nonliterary, the MLA offers
And
divisions in Language Studies and in Teaching.
gitimate the field as a discipline in its own right. (Today,
Given such an organizational grid, it is easy to see
of course, the emergence of the International Association
how
for Literary Semantics and of academic programs such as Interdisciplinary Approaches should have come to
encompass a miscellany of divisions that would other-
the Programme in Literary Linguistics at the University
wise have had no home. Even an area such as children's
of Strathclyde, in Scotland, might lead one to the oppo-
site conclusion. This development alone demonstratesliterature-in
the which the basic materials and methods
highly provisional status of disciplinary designation.)
used differ very little from those appropriate to, say, study
of the English Romantic period-becomes interdisci-
After taking my doctorate, I accepted an assistant
professorship in an English department, where I wasplinary
as- by default when it fails to fit anywhere else in
the MLA architecture.
signed to introductory linguistics courses virtually identi-
The evidence is overwhelming, then, that interdis-
cal in content to those I had taught as a graduate assistant.
Now, however, those courses functioned institutionally
ciplinarity constitutes not an inherent characteristic of
an article, book, course, or research program but the
not as introductions for students embarking on a linguis-
tics major but instead as electives that offered "an inter-
byproduct of a highly contingent system of intellectual
disciplinary perspective" to undergraduates committed
categorization whose form is dictated by locally specific
for the most part to literary studies. institutional forces. This conclusion in turn entails a com-
I then served for several years as director of the mitment
uni- to three partially overlapping principles. First, it
versity's Linguistics Studies Program, a unit classified as
suggests that the epithet interdisciplinary should be used
one of three interdisciplinary programs, the other twoneither to lionize colleagues nor to disparage them, nei-
being Women's Studies and Afro-American Studies. In to elevate their work nor to marginalize it. Scholar-
ther
this instance interdisciplinary acted merely as a synonym
ship may be praised for its originality, insight, coherence,
for interdepartmental (departmental status itself having
or thoroughness, but interdisciplinarity does not belong
been settled a priori). on any such list of criteria. Second, scholars need con-

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 Forum 273

stantly to remind themselves of the permeability and fra- The problem is partly taxonomic. "Interdisciplinary"
gility of the membranes that surround whatever discipline, suggests an almost mechanical linkage between disc
subdiscipline, or interdisciplinary field they are working plines, when in fact all the different modes of intellectu
in, and they need to remain open to the possibility that inquiry fit into a cultural matrix that isn't easily mapped
new interests (their own or those of others) may distance Needless to say, the forced nature of the copula in "litera
them from colleagues in their field or bring them closer ture and science" is no better. Other terms, like "infradis
to those ostensibly outside it. Finally, as members of ac- ciplinary," begin to evoke the idea behind these progra
ademic institutions (a department, a college, a faculty more accurately, but ungainly neologisms often have fe
senate, the MLA itself), scholars should stay alert to the advocates. When my colleagues and I developed a degre
presuppositions that underlie each institution's demarca- program in science, technology, and culture, it met wi
tion of the disciplines, in order that, when necessary, they some resistance because to colleagues in other depar
may defend the presuppositions or, perhaps, argue for ments the title words seemed too disparate to be linke
revised, institutionally more appropriate definitions. It has been our practice to describe the degree as "cu
tural studies of science and technology," a phrasing th
TIMOTHY R. AUSTIN
seems more sensitive to the spirit of what we do th
Loyola University, Chicago
other terms.

The cultural studies of science and technology encom

passes the idea that all forms of cultural expression in
In many ways the profession's sense of interdisciplinarity
fluence
has not changed very much in recent years. In spite and are influenced by the other forms. And whil
of or
hardly a remarkable insight, the idea means compr
perhaps because of current practices in higher education,
which emphasize the narrow specialization needed forscience and technology, disciplines that have a
hending
disciplinary inquiry, the figure of the eclectic tempted
polymathto sustain the appearance of objectivity an
disinterest.
as a model for interdisciplinarity is still predominant. The The ostensible neutrality of science was su
tained
figure is dangerous because it inherently validates by the encyclopedic notion of interdisciplinarit
disci-
which arranged
plinary boundaries and suggests that interdisciplinarity knowledges neatly, distinctly, and-mo
has more to do with capacity and retention than important-separately
with on the plane of intellectual in
synthesis and analysis. quiry. Contemporary views of science and technolog
As interdisciplinary fields such as those that shaped
combineby Foucault, Geertz, Haraway, Latour, Fish, Bee
Hayles, Levine, Shapin, and Serres (to name a few), i
literature and science (the area I know best, as coordina-
tor of the Program in Science, Technology, andsist that everything about science and technology, dow
Culture
at Georgia Institute of Technology) have grown, to its very methodologies, is subject to social and cu
so has
tural influences.
the dilemma of avoiding the reification of conventional
boundaries while resisting the self-congratulatory Thetone
response to this emerging concept of interdi
of the polymath. Both tasks are difficult given ciplinarity
the over- has not always been pleasant. In Higher S
whelming influence of science and technologyperstition,
in social for example, Paul Gross and Norman Levi
and academic discourse. It is hard to resist the cantankerously
impulse defend the sanctity of science and tech
to use "interdisciplinarity" (now a buzzword across
nologythe from critical scrutiny that stems from any sourc
but the discipline itself. Using the "social constructio
curriculum) to reassert the importance of the humanities
in universities increasingly driven by technical of
andscience"
voca- as a universal bogeyman, they warn that u
tional imperatives. No matter how well intentioned, thisbarbarians are at the gates of science and tha
qualified
the sole aim of these "intruders" is vandalism and de-
strategy is misguided not merely because it reinforces
struction. Yet if annihilation is on anyone's mind, it
the hierarchy of disciplines but also because it implicitly
suggests that interdisciplinary programs are important
seems to be on the scientists'. Gross and Levitt indulge a
primarily because of the service role they play fantasy
for morethat involves successfully replacing the faculty
established programs in science and engineering.of a humanities department with autodidact (read poly-
Even the most well-intentioned colleagues imagine
math) scientists who could "patch together" a functional
that literature-and-science programs are essentially elab- department. It is difficult to imagine a more
humanities
orate forays into technical communication, with a minor
perverse or cynical view of interdisciplinarity; yet, as I
dose of literary studies to give students the appropriate
have tried to suggest, the very limitation of the term en-
cultural veneer. The popular image of interdisciplinary
ables so outrageous a claim. The barbarians to be feared
programs thus often fails to encompass a fullare sense of
the dilettantes who can construe interdisciplinarity
what being interdisciplinary might actually mean.
so simplistically.

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274 Forum

That researchers should be rigorously committed to scious to the prophetic voice of the wide world dreaming
understanding the objects of their study is surely a cor- on things to come, the validation of knowledge-wher-
nerstone of good scholarship in any discipline. With ever it comes from, out of the library or off the streets-
growing frequency in the humanities, those objects have remains the principal issue of interdisciplinarity, as it
been and will be related to the branches of human inquiry was for L6vi-Strauss in "the science of the concrete."
called science. But science, like almost all subjects with Asking who is doing the validating is sometimes as
intellectual appeal, is a multilayered system that can be much an evasion of the issue as a definition of it, though
approached in diverse ways; while one individual may sometimes too the insistence may come from an un-
be concerned with the practice of science, another may accredited source, as it did many years ago for me in an
study the dissemination of knowledge, and yet others the affective in-between, which remains in memory as a cau-
invention of methodologies or the application and im- tionary tale. My first degree was in chemical engineer-
plementation of results. Cultural productions, whether ing, and my first book, on my work in the theater (in
scientific, technological, literary, or artistic, all emerge which I started a career while completing a doctorate in
from environments that resist the scientifically useful English and American literature), had a chapter entitled
but highly artificial notion of mutually exclusive cate- "Growing Up with Entropy"; the title crossed one of the
gories. The project of the cultural studies of science is gospels of the 1960s, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Ab-
not to announce the arrival of interdisciplinarity; it is to surd, with an unresolved fascination for that rather dis-
help us find our way in a world that is always already tressing concept of the second law of thermodynamics. I
interdisciplinary. had studied that law at a time when it was possible to
solve all problems (at least on exams) with almost no the-
ALAN RAUCH
oretical understanding of what entropy was, though I had
Georgia Institute of Technology
a premonition that it wasn't very good. It wasn't until I
began to study literature and thought about Hamlet,
Emma re-
It may be that God is in the grammar, as Nietzsche Bovary, the bald spot on Vronsky's head, Bartleby
theus,
marked, but with epistemology failing around Scrivener,
we Didi and Gogo, or the Eliotic version of the
keep announcing a dissident writing beyond theSaussurian
certain-signifier, words slipping, sliding, and decay-
ing with imprecision, that I grasped the idea of entropy
ties of the sententious, or a language of "performativity"
as a func-
that will outwit, baffle, or abolish the regulatory measure of the unavailable energy of the universe,
tions that work in the name of the law. The spacethe
in increase
which of randomness causing a leak.
this is to be accomplished is an affective "in-between," There was a moment, however, when I was rather
where subversion is second nature and the model of in-chastened, and with an authority I've rarely encountered
in an academic context. When he was a teenager, one of
surgency is the diasporic agency of those who have suf-
fered the depredations of history but managed-through my sons had a friend named Charles, a buckle-and-
the lore of displacement or fragmentation, its aporetic leather type who might have been a Hell's Angel but who
murmurs or marginal noise-to keep the struggle going later, as a National Merit Scholar, finished the entire
and academics charged. chemistry curriculum at Stanford in his first year. Charles
If there is "a mode of minimum rationality" whose rather liked my thinking about scientific concepts in what
he considered a "literary" way, but one time, as I pressed
versatility of articulation not only has survival power but
also changes the subject of culture (Homi K. Bhabha, an issue with a metaphorical leap, the indulgence sud-
"Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt," Culturaldenly snapped: "You don't know," he said, "what the fuck
you're talking about." And I suddenly knew I didn't.
Studies, ed. Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler [Routledge,
1992] 57), it is not now and is not likely to be, in any Vanity being what it is, that didn't prevent me from
foreseeable future, the heuristic mode of any scholar- thinking across borders, still growing up with entropy
(but defined now, too, by information theory) as a mea-
ship, within the disciplines or across them. Nor will the
"radical project" of cultural studies, infinitely extendedsure of the uncertainty of knowledge. Sometimes, I
think, we haven't learned to live in doubt. While the Hei-
through alien cultures but, like Einstein's universe, curv-
ing back on itself, escape the positivism it deplores- deggerian notion of a boundary as a beyonding and not a
canons of judgment, rules of evidence, and, despite customs barrier has been taken up by critical theorists,
postmodernism's devastating critique of authority, the current debates still presume that passports need to be
question of authority nevertheless. Whatever the appar- stamped and subject positions declared. The rites of pas-
ently borderless energy acquired in passing from the sage across boundaries are not really settling for an
in-between, where space and time cross with variable
insularity of the literary text through the political uncon-

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 Forum 275

knowledges and ideological differences-what is being lation of American traditions and an understanding of
settled on instead is a new set of categorical imperatives. the potential trouble spots for United States world domi-
I certainly won't tell Pat Buchanan, but this development nance. The struggles of the social movements of the
puts a quite limiting damper on the debates, even when 1960s and early 1970s also helped usher in interdisciplin-
we're urged to teach them. And though over the entire ary programs in women's studies, black studies, Chicano
spectrum of cultural studies all are urged to historicize, studies, and gay and lesbian studies. These fields intro-
there is one dominant theorization of history, into which duced analytical categories such as gender, race, sexual-
all the talk of histories is accommodated. The knowl- ity, imperialism, and colonialism that cut across the
edge that seems to be falling between the cracks here re-disciplines and enabled the discernment of objects whose
mains with historians who are largely unread. formulation and study pointed to the political stakes of
The legitimacy of crossing or hybridizing disciplines the epistemological enterprise.
is not so much in question anymore but the claims being Institutionalized in part as a form of crisis manage-
made in a crisis of authority with the rhetoric about sub-
ment by the government in the 1970s, these programs are
versions and transgressions while invisible power isnow fending off the assault of the conservative turn in
laughing up its sleeve. Meanwhile, the "heat death" of
United States politics. Their predicament is compounded
entropy has taken another turn, a sort of clinamen in the
by the availability of new forms of inter- or transdisci-
void, into chaos theory, where the laws of physics are plinarity, such as multicultural and cultural studies. With
seen less as laws than as functional reductions that per-the waning of affirmative action and other Great Society
mit one to think about complex systems, like that of lateprograms, boards of trustees and university administra-
capitalism, whose reality is neither a logic nor a law buttions can more easily justify cutting ethnic studies pro-
rather an environmental totality of forces and tendencies grams or folding them into cultural studies programs that
only predictable within the shadowy limits of the indeter-presumably address issues of race and gender while en-
minacy principle. There is another lesson here for inter-joying wide popularity and a solid market share in jour-
disciplinary studies. However programs are structured, nals, university press publications, and the media.
allowing for the suffusion of disparate knowledge that is According to a recent report, area studies programs
in some final analysis, as Wallace Stevens might say, theare also destined for cutbacks if not outright elimination
weather of itself, what is precipitated as weather (or not)
now that the cold war that justified them has ended. Be-
may arise from incremental variants of the most unfore-
cause they were seen as crucial to national security, even
seeable kind, with chance having "the last featuring blow research that "had no identifiable relationship to cold
at events," as in the mat-weaving sequence of Moby- war concerns" was supported (Stanley J. Heginbotham,
Dick. This is not to yield all of reality to the aleatoric,
"Rethinking International Scholarship," Items 48.2-3
only to recognize that when inquiry moves from a sub-
[1994]: 33-40; 34). Funders now give priority to such
ject position to an institutional or global scale-withissues as ethnic rivalries and the negotiation of diversity
shifting demographies, forced migrations, satellite trans-
in civil society, the understanding of nationalisms and
mission, and transnational finance, and where decoloniza-
religious fundamentalisms, the transition to democracy,
tion is matched by resurging nationalisms with obdurate
and other factors crucial to the development (or hin-
histories-then the capacity to think about reality acrossdrance) of markets and market institutions (William H.
disciplinary and cultural borders requires something less Honan, "The Quadrangle Becomes a Globe," New York
formulaic than the going historicism or the mantras on
Times 6 Nov. 1994, sec. 4A: 14+). Culture and diversity
power arising from an overdose of Foucault. In this re-
are growing in popularity in the humanities and social
gard, in between, there is still a leak in the universe.
sciences, not only because United States demographic
trends require a rearticulation of national identity but also
HERBERT BLAU
because social science and business programs are "focus-
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
[ing] scholarly attention on issues of ethnicity, religion,
and language" (Heginbotham 37). A recent textbook on
A political analysis of disciplinary and interdisciplinary
global marketing highlights the "cultural values that
knowledge could not be more timely as the Unitedmake
States
[marketing techniques] useful in formulating stra-
university undergoes profound changes in the 1990s.
tegicAtplans and programs in the global marketplace"
the beginnings of the cold war era, linguistic, literary,
(Richard L. Sandheusen, Global Marketing [Hauppauge:
and cultural instruction in American studies, area pro- 1994] 99). Drawing on a range of research into
Barron's,
grams in Soviet studies, and Latin American studies
national and local cultures, this marketing approach at-
emerged as part of an effort to foment both a new tempts
articu- to approximate a "global cultural studies" (105).

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276 Forum

The focus on the diversity of values in the global mar- established disciplines. The and in "psychoanalysis and
ketplace as a way of capturing and retaining an expanding literature," "law and literature," or "science and litera-
range of consuming publics has affected trends in educa- ture" signifies a goal difficult to define, much less achieve.
tion and employment-not only the emergence of MBA Scholars in one field often confront the twin tendencies
and other training programs in global business but the of their counterparts in the other field to trivialize their
transformations in the United States university system as work and to idealize it. Psychoanalysts, for example, may
a whole. That "American education needs to go global" reduce literary criticism to literary appreciation and ex-
means "internationalizing the curriculum" at home, par- empt its practices from any need or desire to produce
ticularly in elite institutions that will develop the expen- "scientific" (objective, reproducible, predictive, quantifi-
sive interdisciplinary programs to give their students a able) change, while simultaneously wondering at the sub-
competitive advantage in the global marketplace. It also tleties of literary theory. Literary critics may dismiss the
means that well-off foreign students will help maintain debate about the hermeneutic basis of psychoanalysis as
the financial health and influence of United States grad- irrelevant or obsolete, while idealizing the transformative
uate programs at elite institutions (Honan 15). cultural force of psychoanalytic theory. Rather than col-
Interdisciplinary programs at public colleges, while laborate as equals, we too often appropriate the "other"
important for achieving understanding of a multicultural, discipline on our own terms, subjecting it to our needs
multiracial society, will prepare students at best for jobs and wishes. We distort it by investigating and using only
in the middle levels of the ever-growing service sector. those elements we choose and disregarding the field
The programs may also help trim the size of faculties as as a whole. As a result, our would-be collaborators in
interdisciplinarity does double and even triple duty in the discipline we find so alluring may dismiss us as ill
satisfying culture, pluralism, diversity, humanities, and informed. Psychoanalysts, for example, smile in bemuse-
social science requirements. Thus, interdisciplinary pro- ment when literary critics assume that psychoanalytic
grams may help the efforts of budget-cutting politicians theory stopped with Freud (or Jung or Winnicott or
who are brokering the business sector's evasion of the Lacan). Literary critics smile when psychoanalysts as-
public good. Indeed, the intersection of elite universities sume that literary theory stopped with New Criticism.
with the global marketplace-the president of one uni- Interdisciplinary work requires the investigator to
versity is intent on making it a "center for worldwide honor the assumptions, the history, the methods, and the
conferences of university leaders" (15)-may be contrib- current multiplicity of each discipline. Literary critics
uting to the underdevelopment of public higher education. often seem unaware of important conversations taking
While interdisciplinary studies provides different ways place among colleagues in other fields. They would do
of discerning objects of study and understanding how the well to attend to those debates; they may find issues re-
disciplines are implicated in a politics of knowledge, it markably similar to those in their own field. Concern for
is important to keep in mind that all interdisciplinarities "the subject" and "agency," for example, is common
are not equal. So long as the term and the programs that to the work of feminist, queer, postcolonialist, new-
go under it remain unexamined, the inequities that are historicist, and textual critics who are studying ways that
already being instituted will receive the imprimatur of a representation is generated and positioned through sets
justifiably sought-after recognition of diversity. The in- of human relationships. It is also a major concern of
terests served by such programs need to be examined, no such psychoanalytic theorists as Daniel Stern, who is
matter how pedagogically sound the programs are. testing psychoanalytic concepts through observations of
infants and parents; Thomas Ogden, who is developing an
GEORGE YUDICE
important new "relational" paradigm of psychoanalysis;
Hunter College, City University of New York
Stephen Mitchell, who is redefining the psychoanalytic
situation as a meeting of the "multiple selves" of analyst
Interdisciplinary is a vexed term that absorbsand analysand; and Stanley J. Coen, who offers a rela-
contradic-
tional theory
tory attitudes and aspirations. For scholars indifferent orof writing and reading. The new relational
paradigm
hostile to traditional organizations of inquiry, is a significant advance beyond the object-
a better
term might be postdisciplinary or antidisciplinary. For and the Lacanian linguistic theory still
relations theory
others, interdisciplinary denotes not a rebuke to estab-
prominent in the work of many psychoanalytic literary
lished fields but a collaboration between them and an ex-critics. At the same time, however, literary critics have
tension of their separate possibilities into new areas. gone beyond most psychoanalytic theorists in under-
Paradoxically, those who undertake collaboration oftenstanding and explicating the implications of object-
face more difficulties than those who simply break with relations theory and Lacanian theory.

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 Forum 277

It is difficult to work at a comparable level of knowl- address these issues in classrooms and in research.

edge and sophistication in more than one field and to rec- Whether or not these two disciplines choose to collabo-
ognize possible intersections and parallels. Few members rate, their common interests, hopes, and fears will be ob-
of one discipline systematically read and keep current, vious to an observer a hundred years from now.
much less gain bona fides, in a second field. There are,
of course, exceptions: Roy Schafer uses literary theory SARA VAN DEN BERG

to explicate psychoanalytic theory; Meredith Skura traces University of Washington

the parallel developments of practices in literary criti-

cism and clinical psychoanalysis in The Literary Use of In the prehistory of feminist cultural studies-by which
the Psychoanalytic Process; and Patrick Mahony reads I mean certain stunning intellectual moves that preceded
Freud's writings with careful attention to the psychic and the introduction of feminist work into the academy-there
rhetorical sources of their style. A number of literary crit- stand two monumental studies, Virginia Woolf's A Room
ics since Norman Holland and Steven Marcus (including of One's Own and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second
Skura and Mahony) have completed formal training in Sex, both models of original inquiry into the female con
psychoanalysis, despite strong opposition from psycho- dition and of interdisciplinary approaches to that inquiry.
analysts who fear the trivialization of their field as just A work of imaginative literature, A Room of One'
another kind of interpretation. Others, like me, have not Own begins with the implied question, What abou
completed such study but are fortunate to work with psy- women and fiction? In order to get to her famous con-
choanalysts who generously instruct literary critics in clusion, at once material and cultural, that a woman
their discipline and welcome reciprocal comments on lit- needs five hundred pounds a year and a room of her ow
erary criticism. Many critics have been drawn to psycho- to write fiction, Woolf has to learn what amount to alie
analytic methods and derive their claim to authority from tongues, including the discourses of history, economics
their personal experience of psychoanalysis, but the ex- and sociology. Beauvoir, also a woman of letters, exam
pense of analysis and of psychoanalytic candidacy makes ines texts from biology, anthropology, philosophy, soc
both kinds of training difficult for many scholars to un- ology, and fiction to articulate for the first time th
dertake. I do not know of any psychoanalysts who have theory now called the social construction of gender.
subsequently undertaken doctoral studies in literature, Although the ideological and institutional barriers
although the curriculum in several psychoanalytic insti- these two women encountered were formidable, at least
tutes is being altered to include the perspectives of other no department head told Woolf to keep off other disci-
disciplines. At the Seattle Institute for Psychoanalysis, plines' turf or that literary study could not accommodat
for example, first-year candidates are asked in what ways her question, Why are women poor? No committee chai
they might consider an analysand a text to be read. Inter- said to Beauvoir that the question whether one is born o
disciplinary centers for research, like those at New York becomes a woman is settled in the delivery room, not th
University, the University of Florida, and the State Uni- philosopher's study.
versity of New York, Buffalo, facilitate ongoing work and By contrast, a feminist critic in the academy today at
communication through conferences, publications, and tempting, however modestly, to follow the trails blazed
Internet bulletin boards. In other places, scholars rely on by Woolf and Beauvoir runs headlong into the walls es-
informal discussion groups and personal friendships. tablished by her own and other disciplines, each with it
Most often, interdisciplinary courses are developed and characteristic object of study, research methods, and
taught within established departments. In such depart- discursive practices. Indeed, bringing feminist studie
ments, interdisciplinary work may be regarded as a radi- into the academy has entailed a confrontation with the
cal challenge, then accepted, then dismissed. traditional organization of knowledge into disciplines
I believe that practitioners of every discipline live in "What is this?" I used to be asked about my early work
the same moment and are moved to ask the same ques- "It's not literature, it's-it's sociology!" And sociologist
tions, albeit framed in their own vocabularies. Right felt free to dismiss the same work as hopelessly tainted
now, a major concern in our society is violence, both by belles lettres.
public and private, rooted in a sense of lost relationships Nonetheless, the institutional barriers that determine
and lost agency. Not surprisingly, there has been a resur- whether it is possible for such work to be carried on at all
gence of interest among psychoanalysts here and in South are insignificant next to the barriers in my mind, echoing
America in the work of Melanie Klein, the preeminent the internal voice that Woolf called the angel in the house
psychoanalytic theorist of rage, hatred, and loss. Teach- and that she heard cautioning restraint in criticism of the
ers, theorists, and critics of literature are also trying to patriarchy. The angel I hear-who sounds more like th

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278 Forum

bank robot reciting my inadequate balance than any I am currently collaborating with the anthropologist
imaginable angel-scornfully inflates my attempts to use Ryan Bishop on a study of international sex tourism en-
the insights of other disciplines into delusions of poly- titled Night Market: Thailand in Postcolonial Sexual
math grandeur. Scholarly integrity and the responsible Cartographies. Jointly reviewing a book in the same
care that it informs are useful and enabling qualities, but field, we found that each of us unquestioningly assigned
the fear that I can't possibly know anything about eco- it to a genre that derived from our own disciplinary
nomics or government because a whole department in the framework. Bishop read it as meta- if not subethnogra-
next building really knows the subject is paralyzing and phy, whereas I saw it as female confessional (see Ryan
unproductive. What place does or can a discipline assign Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, rev. of Patpong Sisters:
to the outsider's acquired fluency? And is there anything An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World,
of value that the visitor from another field brings with her? by Cleo Odzer, Z Magazine 8 [1995]: 68-70). Although
When I collaborated on a book about feminist schol- both of us would identify our "real field" as cultural stud-
ies, we retained disciplinary reflexes. What saved us was
arship with a historian, a specialist in comparative edu-
precisely our location on "undisciplined" terrain. That
cation, an anthropologist, and a philosopher, we all
and a shared postmodern preference for both-and over
learned how ineradicably, despite our common commit-
either-or solutions. This is decidedly not the usual role
ment to interdisciplinary work, each of us had been
marked by disciplinary experience (Ellen Carol DuBois,of postmodernism on the interdisciplinary scene. For
those feminists whose theoretical model subsumes all
Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Car-
olyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S. Robinson, Feminist the matters I want to explore by way of anthropology,
Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe [Ur- economics, and political theory under the rubric of "dis-
bana: U of Illinois P, 1985]). Our fields had endowed course,"
us literary studies is (always already) top discipline
not only with a body of knowledge and its theoretical as well as master discourse. This self-confident proce-
dure
underpinnings but also with a characteristic mentality- may be many things (the definition of a married
couple as one person-the husband-comes to mind),
perhaps even a mentalite. Thus I discovered in my early
but it is not interdisciplinarity.
forties, after some years as a literary critic and theorist
with a decided interdisciplinary bent, that I was a liter-
LILLIAN S. ROBINSON
ary critic and theorist with an equally decided predilec-
East Carolina University
tion for texts, discourses, metaphors, and tropes. Since I
remain convinced that the central questions of feminist
studies-Why are women poor? still resonates, for in- Are scholars and teachers in literary studies invested
stance-require the insights of many disciplines, inter-
interdisciplinary research? A glance at recent scholars
disciplinary collaboration offers an obvious solution.
suggests "yes," inasmuch as we actively read histor
Indeed, collaborative work has become so important documents
in alongside literary texts, apply our method
feminist scholarship that the issue of collaboration itself
a variety of cultural artifacts, and ponder-in conte
has begun to be analyzed and theorized. like this forum-the extradisciplinary effects of our int
Despite the proliferation of collaborative efforts, aca-
pretive practices. But the answer is surely "no" if be
demic practice continues to create obstacles by refusinginterdisciplinary means regularly examining the mod
and modes of discourse of another field. In fact, as o
to recognize egalitarian authorship, by et-al.-ing later-
listed authors into oblivion, identifying joint authorship
interests expand, we in literary studies become, if an
as joint editorship, and granting each author only a frac-
thing, more certain that textual facts and social acts yie
tion of the credit or sometimes none at all (see Elizabeth
best to our own analyses. This attitude is especially e
Lapovsky Kennedy, "In Pursuit of Connection: Reflec-
dent in my area of research (linguistics and literary c
tions on Collaborative Work," American Anthropologist icism), but it also shapes recent pronouncements
97 [1995]: 29, 32; Lillian S. Robinson, "The Practice of
history and anthropology. We are most insistent ab
Theories: An Immodest Proposal," Concerns 24 [1994]:our particular perspective with those fields that our
14, 18). An institutional context that runs the gamut
panding interests have brought closer to our own.
from incomprehension to hostility does little to fosterSo to recast my initial question: Is borrowing fro
collaborative work. But, once more, some of the greatest
another field or extending the domain of a discipline
obstacles are internal, caused by the same disciplinary
same thing as interdisciplinarity? I have already imp
assumptions and biases that make collaboration neces-that often it is not. And yet certainty about one's own
sary and desirable. ciplinary goals is not wholly a bad thing. As Stanley F

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 Forum 279

once argued, disciplinary boundaries are necessary to does not. Nor can I claim that at present interdisciplinary
ongoing research; otherwise one would not know where interests enhance one's professional profile. (As a psy-
to begin, what to find, how to give evidence ("Being In- cholinguist once observed, everyone suspects you really
terdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do," Profession 89 belong in another department.) But graduate training in
[New York: MLA, 1989] 15-22). We are then living out different disciplines is like experience with other cul-
the inevitable when our perspective on other disciplines tures; nothing serves to illustrate the contingency of
is firmly rooted in our own. Certainly in (or near) my one's methods and models so well as the shock of finding
field, I would praise the local success of research in the problems relocated and redefined. And I value the stimu-
"borrowing" mode, whether it develops or only suggests lating pressure of contrasting disciplinary points of view
disciplinary connections: linguistics-influenced criticism, in professional life. Could I remake our professional
linguistic study of meter, narrative analysis, or pragmatic world, I would ask first for more thought about early
approaches to fictional convention. Though the interdis- graduate specialization. Next I would wish us to ease
ciplinary commitments represented here vary, such proj- disciplinary isolation-to accept a broader range of in-
ects share discipline-specific goals that the outside field terdisciplinary efforts, to collaborate, and to arrange
comes to serve.
structured occasions for interdisciplinary debate. The re-
But to celebrate disciplinary perspective is also here
wards to are not momentous-simply an enhanced
admit insularity. For the paradoxical, and also unattrac-
perspective on our own perspectives.
tive, effect of disciplinary focus is the developing hope,
alternately idealistic and territorial, that literary studies JACQUELINE HENKEL
will merge with neighboring disciplines or absorb them. University of Texas, Austin
How might we otherwise imagine interdisciplinary work?
Most often and obviously our interdisciplinary projects
In my fields of specialty, comparative literature, cinema,
borrow from nearby fields. But being interdisciplinary
and performance, the use of methods from other dis-
could also mean collaborating piecemeal among disci-
ciplines, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, has
plines on some subsuming but partitioned project. More
resulted in groundbreaking reconsiderations of the re-
rarely, an interdisciplinary effort might generate across
ceived genealogies of subjectivity, gender, sexuality,
departments a cowritten paper addressing a question nei-
race, class, and culture. The general acceptance of the
ther author can solve alone. Whatever the interdisciplin-
merits of interdisciplinary study is attested by the fre-
ary mode or aim, we would expect such projects to work
quency with which national literature departments hire
best when the goals of each discipline are compatible
colleagues with interests and training in other fields:
enough to focus research but enough at odds to stimulate
new approaches to old problems. And we would comparative
assume literature, ethnic studies, philosophy, cin-
ema,
that interdisciplinary training succeeds most when it art,
findsanthropology, et cetera. But such self-willed in-

institutional support. stitutional cross-fertilization has resulted in the frequent

erosion
A number of points relevant to literary studies of the intellectual reciprocity that should motivate
follow
and legitimate interdisciplinary study. I am referring to a
from these simple observations. First, interdisciplinary
collaboration is everywhere suspect but nowherekind more
of interdisciplinary hegemony in which advocacy
of one discipline remains suspiciously neglectful of the
than in literary studies, which barely credits coauthorship
materialand
within departments. Second, collaborative partners and conceptual legacy of another.
compatible projects are hard to find. InstitutionalIn some cases, this neglect results from the pursuit
factors
of the modern at the expense of research and reflection
are partly to blame, but arguments for interdisciplinarity,
on the
cast as "boundary breaking," fail to serve us if they ancient. Although this practice is certainly not
foster
merely adversarial postures. We would converse novelwith
to the history of the humanities, it works no better
outside fields better-in order both to teach and to be for new epistemologies than it did, say, for the new sci-
taught-were we to live more comfortably withence that eventually returned to the reading of the an-
disci-
cients. In other cases, interdisciplinary hegemony results
plinary difference. Finally, as we streamline graduate
programs in response to economic pressures, students
from the hallucinatory effects of exposure to new materi-
als and methods that leave colleagues relatively indiffer-
will find interdisciplinary work-the kind that seriously
invests in two fields-increasingly difficult to do. ent to the disciplined pursuit of their doctoral subject and
their pedagogy in, say, literary study. One bothersome
How important is it to maintain and extend interdisci-
plinary projects? I would not say that work that calls it- of such headlong pursuit of the other (discipline
feature
self interdisciplinary is somehow superior to workor that
period) is the arbitrary bricolage of this or that from

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280 Forum

one discipline to embellish another. Yet this mainly Openness to interdisciplinary reciprocity can also
benign result may be symptomatic of more troubling work to the advantage of psychoanalysis, which all too
methodological challenges facing the welcome rise of frequently contrasts the pathos of the unresolved illnesses
interdisciplinary pursuit. of its patients with the bathos of artistic creativity and
The most serious challenge is the political temptation sublimation. In making that contrast, the psychoanalyst
simply to abandon study of a particular discipline or his- remains indifferent to the psychosocial structures and
torical literature in response to ideological biases that traumas of cinematic and literary representation, visuality
might have framed the discipline or literature in the past. and textuality, to which Freud was drawn for guidance
It is true that consideration of the methodological roots of in understanding the enigmas of psychical presentation.
particular disciplines may involve prolonged analyses of Turning reciprocally to examples of the cinematic and lit-
frustrating matters that scholars might rather transcend, erary matter of psychoanalysis would promote discussion
like the reliance of early modern theater and philosophy of how creative fantasy often speaks on behalf of psycho-
on figures of the "savage" or Freud's phallocentric affec- analysis. Such comparative study would consider how the
tion for the trials of Oedipus. But at issue is whether his- illusions of fantasy (like those of literature and visual
torically laden disciplinary epistemologies and economies culture) serve as the partial support of psychoanalytic re-
can be adapted to emergent social and political consider- ality in lending structure to the aural and visual relations
ations. Conversely, is it intellectually prudent to assume of analysis. While it may be difficult to recognize and to
that emergent fields have little to glean from the disci- map the visual and aural registers of the psyche, it may
plinary methods and legacies now under suspicion? be illuminating to situate them in analogous relation to
For example, cinema studies, which is particularly in- the psychosexual mechanics of cinema and literature
terdisciplinary in practice, has witnessed a growing sus- (which themselves are frequently compounded by refer-
picion about psychoanalysis, one of the disciplines to ence to the theorizations of psychoanalysis and trauma).
which it has been theoretically indebted. Even scholars Of course, the challenge and/or danger of focused in-
working outside this field have heard the call to dismiss terdisciplinary reciprocity is that such work may alter the
psychoanalysis for favoring phantasmatic generality over foundational assumptions of the fields under considera-
tion. But even when such welcome alterations result in
historical particularity and for being historically hostile
or indifferent to a wide range of identity positions, espe- the definition of evolving disciplinary practices, as with
cially those with feminist, racial, queer, and postcolonial cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies,
inflections. These criticisms derive from the understand- they will not maintain their efficacy without an active di-
able concern that specific film practices will be reduced alogue with the historical reevaluation of the disciplines
to something like a master discourse of psychoanalysis. from which they emerge. Finally, in response to the seri-
But they are also based on the questionable assumption ous crises in staffing both traditional and emergent cur-
that cinematic analysis can easily distinguish politics ricula, sensitivity to the intellectual benefits of reciprocity
from fantasy, force from desire, and cinema from psycho- must involve a refusal to bend to economic and political
analysis. Even more problematic, these suspicions remainpressures simply to trade one curriculum for another. The
blind to the historical bases of interdisciplinarity itself. exciting pedagogical challenge of the twenty-first century
Is it even possible to dissociate clearly the historical de- will necessitate reliance on the principles of interdisci-
velopment of the modern institutions of psychoanalysis plinary and historical reciprocity in shaping the univer-
and cinema? Haven't both disciplines been complicitous sity curriculum of the future.
in borrowing from each other to help map the modernist
TIMOTHY MURRAY
parameters of female and male subjectivity and sexual-
Cornell University
ity? And haven't related conceptualizations of perspec-
tive, hallucination, visualization, moving images, voice,
and echo been crucial to both? For instance, contempo- To the extent that literary criticism has concerned it
rary cinema's stilted portrayal of psychoanalysis (Basic with reference, it has had an interdisciplinary object.
Instinct, Whispers in the Dark, Silence of the Lambs, etc.) many topics taken up by nineteenth-century British pe
and recent psychoanalytic studies of transference (Pon- odicals, for instance, as they invoke one subject (l
talis, Green, Borch-Jacobsen, Kristeva, Zizek) reveal economics, religion) to explicate another (poetry, nov
how cinematic flashback and hallucinatory projection romance) demonstrate the practical recognition of
are con joined in the gendered representation and analy- point. The assumption that words mean is itself in
sis of trauma. disciplinary. A reference to marriage in Shakespea

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 Forum 281

sonnets draws its meaning from discourses of history, re- visual arts, and literature, evidentiary claims (as well as
ligion, and heterosexuality. "Marriage" is intelligible only their dismissal) tend to police intellectual movement; this
through reference to other terms; the sliding of the chain policing can take the form of reifying certain truth claims
of signification is not just the slippage between signifier while not adequately problematizing the methodology
and signified but also the meaning-producing movement that produced them. Recourse to "rules of evidence" fails
that occurs through the frames of disciplinarity. to account for the extent to which the adjudication of
If, as Derrida argues, the law of genre requires its own claims is a disciplinary formation. Not only does each
contamination, the law of discipline equally depends on discipline construct its own criteria of proof, but what
the unacknowledged permeability of its boundaries. Be- counts as proof is itself contested within, as well as
cause disciplines are in continual transformation, it across, disciplines. To understand this contest in histori-
is inadequate, for example, to use a legal text such as cal terms is the crux of interdisciplinarity. Rather than
Blackstone's Commentaries to gloss a reference in By- use presumptive standards of admissibility to discredit
ron's Don Juan to contract law, because the two texts speculative work, we need to ask how a matrix of evi-
were engaged in a wider political struggle over the mean- dence gains consensus, by means of which criteria of in-
ing of public agreements; this struggle shaped, and con- clusion and exclusion. By what means is evidence read
tinues to shape, law, literature, legal scholarship, and as symptomatic of an "event"? To the extent that the
literary criticism. Alternatively, to understand the legal concept of evidence is a scientific or legal paradigm, how
context for Shakespeare's Othello requires thinking does evidence in those discourses depend on literary,
about how criminal law has been shaped by readers- historical, and religious presuppositions?
usually admirers-of Shakespeare (several Tennessee Pressuring the status of evidence by means of such a
legal opinions in murder appeals quote Shakespeare to genealogy suggests the possibility of moving beyond cur-
justify their narrative). This recursive dynamic marks rent configurations of proof. It might be useful to sup-
the political and intellectual necessity of a historicizing plant the epistemological privilege of evidence with that
interdisciplinarity that regards the construction and of the predictive hypothesis: If we hypothesize X, what
maintenance of the disciplines as part of the meanings of do we bring to light that might otherwise have been oc-
texts-even those texts that seem most comfortably nes- cluded? Using predictive hypotheses provisionally is a
tled in the realm of the aesthetic. tenuous, enabling form of scholarship that demands in-
Certain topics and questions are more visibly marked tellectual generosity. The payoff is the foregrounding of
than others by the disciplinary wars that result in their evidence as a circular, accretive construction contingent
current intelligibility. For example, the effort to analyze on historical selectivity and disciplinary criteria.
the representation of lesbianism is hampered by the dom- The existence of different paradigms of proof contrib-
inance of one discourse-psychoanalysis-in the crea- utes to the lack of protocols for engaging in dialogue and
tion of the object of inquiry. This dominance gives rise to the difficulty of translating across disciplines. These
to several strategies: to reconstitute the lesbian within paradigms in turn give rise to the illusion that while one's
the terms of psychoanalysis; to scuttle psychoanalysis own field is fractured, contradictory, and riven, other
altogether (but that leaves the history that gave rise to it fields are stable, coherent, and open to untroubled expor-
intact); or to perform a genealogy of the diacritical for- tation. When we turn to an eighteenth-century legal text
mation of both psychoanalysis and lesbianism. But the for a notion of marriage, for instance, and learn that it is
point remains that the disciplinary boundary is as pro- an "economic union original to civil society" (The Laws
nounced around the lesbian as it is around psychoanaly- respecting Women, 1777), we should not accept this defi-
sis. Or the invisibility of the object may be enacted by its nition as a gloss on the marriage plot or as a statement of
dispersal across disciplines. The representation of the the way things were or as an irrelevancy to the aesthetic
human body, for instance, has been parceled among lit- expression of desire. Rather, we should explore as politi-
erature, history, philosophy, the visual arts, and the sci- cal conflict and rhetorical positioning the heteroglossic
ences; in a sense, to refuse to engage with the body's production of what marriage will, always provisionally
interdisciplinarity is to reproduce its dismemberment. and partially, have meant. Analogously, when we speak
Both of us-an early modern gender theorist and a of interdisciplinarity in the present tense, we do so with
British romanticist-are concerned about the specific little sense of how certain subjects remain inconceivable
conceptual boundaries we confront in our individual because of current disciplinary configurations. High-
projects. One limit, however, circumscribes us both: the lighting how discourses and disciplines are produced as
construction, reading, and utilization of evidence. As a stable, resisting the practice of merely importing the
scholar works in the interstices of history, science, law, findings of other domains in order to engage with and

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282 Forum

critique their guiding terms, is a crucial challenge posed problems of interpretation and cultural contact. It's arro-
by interdisciplinarity today. gant for scholars in fields like postcolonial studies not to
know and acknowledge landmark texts in anthropology
MARK SCHOENFIELD that raise and illuminate key questions. Interdisciplinary
Vanderbilt University scholars need to fill in gaps like these. In the same way,
interdisciplinary critics in literature and theory depart-
VALERIE TRAUB
ments need to learn more about statistical documenta-
Vanderbilt University and
tion, interviewing and sampling techniques, and fields
University of Michigan
that require special expertise, like math and music.
But there is no getting away from interdisciplinarity,
Every discipline has rules and limitations of its
even in own-
the way people write. Many disciplines-ethnog-
certain ways of doing things, both for better and
raphy, for and literary criticism-are being affected
history,
worse. Interdisciplinary study works because by
people from
impulses toward narrative and memoir in scholarly
one discipline are not routinely bound by the same
writing. To as-
some extent, such trends are a product of the
sumptions as people from another. They do not necessar-
prestige of literary studies. Most of all, perhaps, they are
ily share the same blind spots, focus on the same things,
the result of an increased interest in crossover writing,
or think about problems in the same way. So,notoften, they scholars but also among the university
just among
can see through the assumptions that groundpresses
other and
disci-
trade houses that publish them. But such im-
plines so thoroughly that the assumptions have
pulses become
partly derive from interdisciplinarity itself. When
invisible axioms. People from another discipline cancrosses
writing un- disciplines, scholars cannot count on cap-
derstand problems-and, sometimes, reachtive
solutions-
or built-in audiences. Prose has to be accessible to
in a new or cogent way. In other words, interdisciplinarity
people who are not longtime specialists. Terms must be
brings with it the benefits of defamiliarization.
defined,Ithowever
can briefly, and references identified. Ar-
break through to powerful insights. guments must live and breathe, as well as have sufficient
Interdisciplinary success stories abound. detail
One to is satisfy
the experts.
reevaluation of Freudian theories that resulted from the
Interdisciplinarity has no promises to keep and none to
perception of narrativity in Freud's case studies or, from
break. It is not a mantra or a magic potion. Work that cuts
a different angle, the perception of his vexed and illogi-
across areas of study is as good or as bad as the individ-
cal ideas about women, which are often the result of met-ual books and articles that do it. Certainly, working across
aphoric thinking gone wild. Another is the broadeningdisciplines is not the only or even always the best way to
of art history from its traditional preoccupations with do scholarly work. Interdisciplinary approaches work
artistic genealogies and iconography to include issues best on problems that show up in more than one part of a
like race and gender. A third is the arrival of poststruc-
culture. For that reason, the rise of interdisciplinarity, and
turalist relativism in anthropology. its future, are tied to cultural studies and cultural criticism.
Literary studies has played an important role in all For readers of PMLA, who are trained in literary stud-
these developments. It was unlikely, to give one exam-
ies and love it, close reading is likely to be the basis for
ple, that a trained psychologist would have thought aboutinterdisciplinary work. Whatever kind of text they are
Freud as a storyteller or a master of metaphor; both per-working on-novel, poem, photograph, film, painting,
ceptions were natural for literary critics. Interdisciplinar- ethnography, or psychological casebook-their skills as
ity has enhanced the power and prestige, not to mentionclose readers are essential. Interdisciplinarity also re-
the available subject matter, of my discipline-importantquires research in a scrupulous number of primary and
benefits of interdisciplinary studies to members ofsecondary texts or in archives. Still, the goal of such re-
the MLA.
search should not be to re-create the specialist's training
Not all the gifts of interdisciplinarity are unambigu-
point by point. Indeed, that kind of re-creation can never
ous, nor are all uniformly welcome. Some ethnographers,
be done by someone who comes to one field profession-
for example, don't want to hear how poststructuralism ally after mastering another. But the exact replication of
compromises the validity of their findings. They equate
another discipline's point of view would defeat the main
poststructuralism with self-consciousness or narcissism.
purposes of interdisciplinarity: defamiliarization, fresh
It might be healthier for them to point out that ethnogra-
insights, skills from one area of expertise enriching an-
phy has addressed the issue of cultural relativism for a
other and making up for another's limitations.
long time, for example, in the work of Franz Boas. In
fact, too few literary theorists have bothered to read MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK
foundational books in anthropology, which often address Duke University

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