ABSTRACT
This book is about how we organize knowledge into disciplines, and then reorganize it into new configurations and alliances, or forms of ‘interdisciplinarity’, when these old ways of thinking have come to seem stale, irrelevant, inflexible or exclusory. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ has become a buzzword across many different academic subjects in recent years, but it is rarely interrogated in any great detail. As Alan Liu puts it, interdisciplinary study is
‘the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy’ (Liu 1989: 743). This book aims to examine the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been variously defined, and the debates that have been conducted about its meaning, purpose and practical applications. Within this larger topic, it also has a more specific aim: to introduce students working within the field of literary studies to interdisciplinary perspectives from other fields such as cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, geography and the sciences. My main argument will be that we cannot understand inter-
disciplinarity without first examining the existing disciplines, since interdisciplinary approaches are always an engagement with them, and the modes of knowledge that they exclude by virtue of their separation from each other. The term ‘discipline’ has two principal modern usages: it refers to a particular branch of learning or body of knowledge, and to the maintenance of order and control amongst subordinated groups such as soldiers, prison inmates or school pupils, often through the threat of physical or other forms of punishment. Interestingly, these two usages converged in some of the earlier uses of the term, from the first half of the fifteenth century onwards. ‘Discipline’ in this context suggested a particular kind of moral training aimed at teaching proper conduct, order and self-control. In fact, the very notion of the term as a recognized mode of learning implies the establishment of hierarchy and the operation of power: it derives from the Latin, disciplina, which refers to the instruction of disciples by their elders, and it necessarily alludes to a specialized, valued knowledge which some people possess and others do not. As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, one of the earliest uses of the term in English to mean ‘a particular course of instruction to disciples’ was in relation to the ‘Discipline of the Secret’, a phrase used after the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century to describe the restrictive practices in the early Christian Church which taught the elements of the faith to converts while excluding them from heathens and the uninitiated. From the beginning, the term ‘discipline’ was caught up in questions about the relationship between knowledge and power.
