ABSTRACT
Before assessing the key role that interdisciplinarity has played in American studies, a specific example may help in grounding this abstract term. Imagine a literature specialist who takes on the task of evaluating US responses to the Viet Nam War (or ‘the American War’ as, understandably, people in Viet Nam call this conflict of the 1960s and early 1970s which caused the deaths of several million local combatants and civilians, together with over 58,000 US military personnel). Already there is the substance here of a major research project, since the quite familiar archive with which this imagined scholar began has expanded significantly and in several directions. The work is still at this stage confined to the single discipline of literary studies, albeit understanding ‘the literary’ now as sufficiently elastic to include genre fiction and journalistic writing as well as canonised novels and short stories.
