History and Literature

“You can never ever EVER separate history from literature!” This was a statement I heard from my high school AP Lit teacher at least once a class period. It would always make me smile because she said it every time with the same assertiveness and excitement. She NEVER got sick of burning that into our brains. One of the things we have discussed in class this semester is the way primary school students are instructed to view and analyze pieces of literature using the guidelines of new criticism. Their lessons are exam based, and they are graded on their ability to study a single piece of literature as its own separate entity. During this discussion in class, I thought about how my high school English teacher, Ms. Fox, planted a small seed in our brains to encourage a more broadened perspective. With each new book or poem the class was introduced to, Ms. Fox would spend an entire lesson period sharing with us what was going on in the world socially, economically, scientifically, politically, etc. during the time of the piece’s origin. She reiterated the fact that authors have always been influenced by other elements in the world around them. An excerpt from Interdisciplinarity reminded me of this. “In short, [literature] is about life in all its diversity, and this is hard to accommodate within the narrow parameters of a discipline…Unless we are solely concerned with the mechanical and formal properties of language sooner or later we have to start dealing with the relationship between words and their referents, or between literature and ‘the outside world’” (Moran, 19) Younger students are taught to view pieces of literature without considering the outside world. For them, English is English, Science is Science, Math is Math, History is History, etc. Interdisciplinarity involves the mixing of academic disciplines which results in the creation of new, multidimensional thoughts and ideas. Even though new criticism is reinforced in exam based levels of education, I really respected my high school AP lit teacher for encouraging her students to pair English with other disciplines.