Introduction

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.