The Origins of Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract

At heart of The Origins of English Novel1 lies this question: how can we conceive constitution of categories in full historicity of their emergence-as they amount neither to their prior determinations nor to their eventual selffulfillment? In confronting this question I found myself pursuing a method at once dialectical and interdisciplinary: attentive to modes of negative definition by which the slowly coalesced in terms of what contemporaries could with some assurance say it was not, and (therefore) inclined to conceive putatively literary matters by variously extra-literary lights. The crucial question I asked of novel may of course be posed of any category. And if we put this question to study itself, dialectical force of our response must be presumed because negative definition of interdisciplinary study-that which overcomes and denies disciplinary division-is an explicit and operational aspect of its character. Accounting for emergence of interdisciplinary thinking must also entail accounting for emergence of its antithetical and indispensable constituents, modern disciplines. We are rightly accustomed to thinking of Enlightenment as period in which foundations were laid for modern disciplinary divisions. In an analogous way, but at a more general level, it is also time when division of knowledge began to be established in its recognizably modern form. By this I mean no more than obvious: secularization of relationship between divine and human that sought to put religion in its place by conceiving it as a discrete mode of knowledge; ambition to historicize knowledge as a distinctively modern inher