Undisciplined

I've been mulling over the interdisciplinarity thread at the Invisible Adjunct. Several people have described my work to me as "interdisciplinary"; on occasion, I've described it as interdisciplinary. But...is it? I normally describe my writing as "literature and religion" or "literature and history" (or, given what I'm currently doing, "literature and religion and history"), but in practice this means that I write as a literary critic while I cite scholars in other fields. Ian Hacking argues that what looks like "interdisciplinary" work normally results from collaborative disciplinary work or else what he terms "applying my discipline in different directions." Hacking's description strikes me as much closer to the actual state of academic affairs, whether it's literary critics writing about law and the novel or historians writing about poetry and politics. As a literary critic, I'm primarily interested in how texts work (rhetoric, figurative language, genre, etc.); I'm also interested in how texts relate to each other. These interests remain constant whether I'm dealing with George Eliot or John Cumming. But historians seem just as interested, if not more so, in everything around text X--how it came to be, what its existence means, how it was distributed, how much money it made, did anyone read it... There are certainly literary critics who think that way--John Sutherland, for example--but most of us aren't really trained to frame questions such as those.

On a slightly different tangent, much interdisciplinary or extended disciplinary work seems oddly ahistorical when it comes to the "other" discipline. That is, academics in Group A appropriate one subset of the academics in Group B, often without thinking about the history or context of the disciplinary conversations that went into producing Group B's scholarship. Literary critics tend to head for those scholars or thinkers whose practice resonates most closely with their own, with the result that our views of other fields tend to be distorted. (I suspect that this is especially the case with psychoanalysis, although there are others more qualified to speak to that position.) It's not just a matter of citing the "wrong" scholar, but sometimes citing work that is controversial (without noting the controversy), outdated, or simply disproven.