As humans, it seems that we have a constant, inherent need and desire to categorize; we put labels on everything, and place every aspect of our lives into neat, little boxes, each set in their own special corner of our minds. I assume this is our brains’ way of comprehending the world around us, by breaking down the information to its most simplistic level and lumping it together with other similar pieces of information – therefore, it is only natural that we have come to take the broad spectrum of knowledge around us and differentiate it into smaller, more concentrated areas of study.
In Interdisciplinarity chapter 2, Moran discusses how a man named Raymond Williams brings up that the “original meaning of ‘literature’ was interdisciplinary,” meaning that the term literature itself used to cover all forms of writing. This includes not just artistic writing, but also covers historical and scientific works. In the present day, literature refers more so to “highly valued” creative writing, not biographies or science journals. This change coincides with (what I believe to be) our tendencies to categorize. What I really find interesting, however, are our attempts to reverse all the specification we have done. The concepts of intertextuality and interdisciplinary actively work against this seemingly natural process of distinguishing between different pieces of information, and work toward finding connections between things people have tried so desperately to separate. Conversely, it’s interesting to me that it seems difficult to restrain the English subject as a whole to one category, despite the efforts of many scholars – though I suppose for Moran’s purposes of interdisciplinarity, it’s helpful to his argument.