Yep, I literally jumped up and down in the classroom when the word dissect appeared in the class discussion about what, according to your experiences, students are often trained to do with literature (in this case, Jean Toomer’s poem, “Reapers”).
As you noted in class, dissection is often associated with the sciences, biology in particular.
So here are some questions that you could turn into a blog post if you so desire: Does the introduction * to Moran’s Interdisciplinarity help you understand talk about how dissection has ended up appearing so frequently in conversations about English classes? If so, how? If not, how not?
* There’s an embedded link to Milne’s e-book of Interdisciplinarity. To get to it, you’ll have to be logged in with a Geneseo username and password.