Author: Emma Medina

We’ve discussed how interdisciplinarity is the collective intertwining of different disciplines of knowledge, so wouldn’t romanticism be, itself, a form of interdisciplinarity? Romanticism is an ideal that is present in literature, obviously, but also art and, maybe surprisingly, social sciences. Of course each discipline takes it’s own part to delve into–i.e. psychologists study nature vs nurture, a principle that romanticists have discussed.

In art, romanticism focuses on the emotions of people and/or manipulating the emotions of the viewer. These pieces of artwork are meant to inspire some sort of emotional reaction and tend to have political or moralistic undertones…basically trying to make a point about the society it exists within. In this sense, romanticist art and literature are nearly one in the same, both are trying to touch the feelings of people and make them react to the problems of their current society.

Further, romanticism is apparent in the social sciences although it is not as philosophical–it focuses on the factual or true emotions of people and how these people are controlled by their environment, or not. This is clearly a more scientific approach, but the findings can lead to the questioning of human nature and push deeper into these controversial ideas of what it means to be human.

This can be shown through the Milgram experiment. The Milgram experiment was a psychological experiment in which an instructor (some actor in a lab coat) ordered a random person to shock another stranger, in a different room unseen, whenever they answered a question wrong to the test they were taking. The random person believed that the person they were shocking was the subject of the experiment when really the shocker was the subject. The catch was that the person being shocked wasn’t actually being shocked, but sounds of pain were heard through the microphone–this was to test to see how far a person would go and for how long a person would listen to someone they believed to be superior. This was also a test to show how nazis could possibly do the terrible things they did just because of a command.

The results shocked people because 65% of the participants followed through to the highest possible shock level, all because of a man in a coat. While this experiment was technically scientific, it lead to the questioning of human nature and showed how ideals of our society affect how people act within it. The environmental factor, man in a lab coat assumed to be important, changed human nature from good to evil and this conversation is present in romanticism.

Alice Walker’s Meridian is an interesting text that represents Jean Toomer’s Cane through intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. In some ways, Meridian could be considered the third level of black ideology, while Cane is the second and The Bacchae is the first. Even The Bacchae, considered the originator in this aspect, would have some elements of other texts and so it cannot be considered the true first level of this ideological exploration.

Continue reading “Conversation Creates Interdisciplinarity”

Continue reading “Separation is Good Unless Paired with Pride”

“‘Transcendental signified’: a thing that has an existence independent of the word that describes it,” (Moran 80). In my high school class, Saussure was briefly discussed in order to understand how words relate to the thing itself and usually they could be mutually exclusive. The differentiation between the sign and the signified is one that goes unnoticed. A thing exists as it’s own and our words apply meaning to said thing, so wouldn’t this mean that Derrida’s transcendental signified exists for every thing in this world? What separates the regular signified thing from a transcendental signified? If we think of it this way, you can also argue that signifiers/words are inherently intertextual. Every past experience someone has with a word is going to influence the meaning of that word. This is how words gain negative or positive connotations, through the collective intertextuality that influences its new meaning. This is ever changing as well, over time words represent new things and take new meanings, so what is a word? How do words exist if their definitions are always changing? Precisely because they don’t change quickly enough.

Continue reading “What is a Word?”