Interdisciplinarity

My intellectual life actually started out very uni-focused—how did it evolve to the point where I became someone often asked to speak on the topic of interdisciplinarity? To ground this potentially very abstract topic, I have begun with the familiar and the particular and moved toward a more general and theoretical understanding of the subject. Therefore, in the first part of this essay, I attempt to deconstruct my own intellectual history: how I developed the framework of thought I call upon today. The subsequent sections address what it means to create—in any form and in combinations of forms—the essence of interdisciplinarity while living in this post post-modern, dystopian moment.

The Dream of Becoming

My childhood vision of my future, the only one I ever had, was that I would get a Ph.D. in literature and become a writer. To this day, I’m not sure where these goals came from. Growing up in Crown Heights, a working class, immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, no one I knew had ever gone to college or written anything, nonetheless, I somehow knew writing was my destiny and I pursued this goal tenaciously.

To this end, I structured my entire intellectual life around literature. In college, I often took six classes a semester, all in literature of different periods, nations, and genres. Sometimes I read 30 plays for one course and 10 novels for another. I wrote three research papers for each class and spent Christmas and New Year’s memorizing literary details at home in New York, preparing for upcoming finals. This went on for four undergraduate years, as I squeezed the other requirements of language, science, art history, and philosophy around this focal point. Although no one would guess this about me from my writing now, or from my resume in general, I was actually educated to be a literary critic.

In the early days of my education—and I’m sure this is true of all disciplines—it was the simple weight of knowledge that I was encouraged to master. My curriculum was structured to encourage a deep, uni-disciplinary education. Studying English and American literature, but of course also learning languages and reading European literature in general, the goal was to know literature, and to talk and write about it with the authority that comes from expertise. We were also educated in the critical apparati of the discipline; studying how people talk about literature, the frames of reference they use, so we could negotiate its complexity. How had these approaches changed? What stage of development were we at now? I was being offered a vertical education, one that allowed me to swim in the deepest sea of ideas, but always ideas emanating from and swirling around the study of literature alone.

As traditional as all this sounds, my education was actually fairly radical. In the mid-sixties, the State University of New York at Buffalo, my undergraduate college, had the most innovative and exciting English Department in the United States. The literature faculty was comprised of the next generation Beat Poets: Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Gregory Corso. The legendary Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were always on the scene. The great epic poet Charles Olson had taught there for many years. Novelist John Barth was in the department, and critics like Leslie Fiedler offered classes in the theory of American literature. Unlike most English departments this faculty valued originality—not the regurgitation of familiar ideas, but the development of new ones, and of interesting combinations of thought that furthered the field. I thrived in this environment because my professors were not concerned with the standard conventions of writing, but were most interested in innovation in form and content. It was here also, in my years of tutorials as an honor student, that I was first introduced to African-American literature as an important component of American literature. Although I already had devoured all the writings of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison on my own, I now found a professor to work with who introduced me to older texts. Although I didn’t realize it at...