Author: Abby Barrett

When I used to think about interdisciplinarity, especially last semester, I would think of it with vast enthusiasm. Though I didn’t have a term for it back then, I remember being floored each time I connected one course to another. I felt that I was accumulating a wealth of transcendent knowledge as some themes didn’t seem to be able to contain themselves to one discipline, but instead were woven throughout them all.

With the mysticism of my realizations dissolved and a newfound term to understand these inter-class connections, I was no less enamored with interdisciplinarity this semester than I was last semester. But I’m coming to realize that being irresponsibly enamored with a connection between disciplines can be just as dangerous as we have learned it to be with other human beings. Continue reading “Enamoring Interdisciplinarity”

The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms is a reference source that locates critical/literary terms both by definition, in history, and with examples. Any words in the definitions that are defined elsewhere in the text are bolded, so that within each definition there are typically several bolded words that can be located elsewhere in the text. This method leads to circularity as one jumps to a bolded word within a definition and in turn has to look up a third definition, all to trace one’s way back to the first definition. As the pages riffle for a while, one wonders if alphabetical order is all it’s hyped up to be, and if things could perhaps be organized into more discrete categories—maybe by time period, writing style, etc.? But many of these would be problematic also.

Perhaps there is no one good way to organize literary terms.

Continue reading “Glossary: Subjective”

Oftentimes scientists try to distance themselves from “soft sciences” and “human sciences,” especially disciplines within humanities that employ art and subjectivity. Professor of physics Alan Sokal has participated in these so-called Science wars, as he posted an article “claiming to argue that science [has] no special claim to truth but [is] instead the product of dominant ideologies” (Moran, Interdisciplinarity 143). He later revealed that this publication was a nonsensical hoax whose ideas he criticized heavily. Sokal and a colleague, Bricmont, “claim that they are not against greater interaction between the sciences and the human sciences but want to establish the ‘preconditions’ for such a dialogue, one of which must be a recognition that ‘the natural sciences are not a mere reservoir of metaphors ready to be used in the human sciences’” (Moran, Interdisciplinarity 144).

If you want to restrict our ability to use your language, Alan Sokal, you should remember that we can similarly reserve the right to restrict yours. If you would like to claim scientific knowledge, and in the same vein claim that we don’t have this knowledge, we can assert our artistic and moral knowledge over yours. After all, if you haven’t studied humanities or art, you can’t really know what you are trying to say. Continue reading “Can Pride Be Measured?”

My dear Mr. Ransom, et. al.: You are the founders of New Criticism, a literary movement that focuses on a text as a single, wholesome entity unto itself. Your method for analyzing literature leaves me with some questions: How do the past and the present have nothing to do with the future? If you like to see poems as objects, as fixed anecdotes in time, will you not see humans this way also? But do I not have a mother? Does her past not affect me? Her childhood? Am I living in white space, as in cartoons, while you peer down at me through a microscope?

The answer is no. My family’s experiences and histories are completely relevant to consider in a critical analysis of the woman I am. I know that subjectivity may seem a hindrance to you, as you seem to dislike thinking about the histories behind writing and the gilded futures they create, winding thread in the minds of readers who will use it to connect the facts. Utilizing measured objectivity is necessary for all fields of study, of course. In this you are correct. However, it is a tradition misguided in its use, as the academic world has learned from the ancients to prize what can be tested and observed above the careful language chosen from a churning heart. Continue reading “Criticism of New Criticism”