ABSTRACT
I have argued that the subjects we study at school, college and university are inventions, constructed in certain times and places for certain reasons. Part of the point of this was to show that we ‘make’ knowledge by actively dividing and categorising the world. One effect of this is that every discipline, if you look at it hard enough, is fuzzy at the edges – for example, where does organic chemistry end and biology begin? The divisions are not clear-cut, because the world itself is not made up of clear-cut categories. Another effect is that disciplines are, for the most part, interwoven with each other. To study sociology, for example,
you need to know about history, maths, statistics and so on. Of all the subjects we study, English is perhaps the most diffuse and interwoven and has the fuzziest edges of all.
