Over the summer I read a short book called The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. The story followed a man, who was also the narrator, during his lunch break. That was it. What made the book so interesting was its descriptiveness. Every observation the narrator made on his lunch break took the story into many other lines of thought. For example, while riding an escalator, the narrator looks down at his shoes and begins thinking about the different reasons for one shoelace to break before the other. These tangents often lead to connections that the narrator makes to his life, so while reading you are occasionally given insight into the narrators experience outside of his lunch break.
I was thinking about this because of how detailed all of the observations were, and how the narrator connected his observations to a lot of different things relating to his experience. In chapter one of Interdisciplinarity, Moran quotes F. R. Leavis, who says english is “a training of intelligence that is at the same time a training of sensibility; a discipline of thought that is at the same time a discipline in scrupulous sensitiveness of response to delicate organizations of feeling, sensation and imagery.” (Moran 30-31). I thought of The Mezzanine when I read this because while at points the extreme amounts of detail show an incredible grasp of the technical aspects of the english language, it also shows how these observations can be used to relate to a reader and ultimately create an emotional effect.
Although I don’t feel that technical skills should be an intellectual qualifier, I felt that The Mezzanine was a good example of the rigor of the english discipline judging by the amount of concrete information conveyed while maintaining an emotional connection to the reader.