Disciplinarity and Beyond
Disciplinarity and Beyond
Whereas standard histories of literary studies have focused on struggles between philologists and another camp known as generalists or belle-lettrists, this second camp might be better understood as aesthetic critics, the chief ancestors of twentieth-century literary studies. Moreover, this conflict is probably less important than the struggle that led to disciplinary separations between literary studies, on the one hand, and speech and drama, on the other. Since highly literary forms of oral performance were widespread at the turn of the century, it is important to analyze the pressures that led to literary studies becoming even more insistently text based (a further contrast with public literary culture, which combined analytic, interpretive, creative, and performative registers). This chapter argues that academic literary studies has been from the beginning disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and antidisciplinary. After examining the discipline’s early incarnation, whose constraints we have only in recent decades been overcoming, the chapter proposes that the interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary dimensions of English literary studies are valuable resources that may allow us to rethink literary studies and literary authority in an era when knowledge is once again being reorganized.
Keywords: disciplinary critique, interdisciplinarity, higher education, academic English, literature and performance, the commons, Internet culture, organization of knowledge
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