English Majors Practising Criticism
About a moon ago, or maybe some time less than a month ago, Dr. McCoy discussed how Alice, emerging in her new, thin body is like meristem tissue. She could do whatever she wanted and no force would stop her, she was determined and confident. For those of you who don’t remember, meristem cells are basically like human stem cells, but in plants, and they last for the entire lifetime of the plant.
Continue reading “Something cool about plants in Alice Achitophel”
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/questions/zulutime.html
Both novels, Meridian and Zulus, work outside of the realm of time. I think Everett did this on purpose. But I’m not quite sure why just yet.
Anything I know about the bible I probably picked up from the Arabic songs on cassette tapes my grandma used to listen to. So I knew enough to knew the first chapter header in Zulus was something biblical, but it was still indecipherable to me. So after looking at “B” and shaking my head, I just ignored that bit of paratextuality.
When one of our classmates who was smart enough to look up Absalom and Achitophel had told the class that it was an allusion to a satirical political allegory, written by John Dryden, that uses the story of the rebellion of Absalom against King David, a story I am not familiar with, something stuck out to me:
“…the wit was Solomon’s…So A is for Solomon for there are better for S and because Solomon was small and a little queer.”
Solomon, whose name means “his peace” in Hebrew, was King David’s son. Of course anyone rebelling against King David’s kingdom could not have known what King Solomon’s reign would be like. But David’s subjects in his war torn kingdom did want what Solomon brought – peace.
This short, slightly biblical, and slightly political, thus interdisciplinary, bit of paratextuality thus opens up a post-apocalyptic, post-war novel quite well: with hope for the future.
Once upon a time classical studies were what a basic education comprised of, and as a result anyone with any sort of education knew a lot more about antiquity (Greek and Roman philosophy, art, languages, etc) than I even want to know. People were a lot more “interdisciplinary.”
The education shift we experienced is because of how much more we have to teach due to new theories and discoveries, as well how much harder it would be to teach “the classics” alongside everything else. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but that shift definitely resulted in a weaker emphasis on the humanities.
This shift in education is easily observable through the change in the way things are named in the science. For example, Magnesium, element 12, discovered in 1618 was named after Magnes in Greek mythology who was killed by Odysseus. On the other hand the naming of elements 104 through 109, discovered during the Cold War, were a lot less sophisticated and a lot more silly. Silly because naming them was a 30 year long controversy over whether or not they should be named after an American or Russian scientist followed by the suffix “ium” (ex. “Lawrencium”). Maybe, had these scientists been better versed in the Classics, naming the elements would have been much easier and more artful.
Biology follows the same trend. Zoologist Carl Linnaeus, often called poetic, created the taxonomic system for classifying life. An example would be”ecdyzoa,” coming from the Greek for “to take off” which is used for animals that shed or molt. The thought put into naming “ecdyzoa” is very different from the thought put into “TaqMan” probe, named after PacMan because it kinda looks like PacMan following an enzyme called “Taq Polymerase.”
While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way scientific nomenclature has changed over the centuries. I do think it is interesting how the way education has changed over the centuries worked to further polarize the disciplines.
Because humans are dimorphic women are generally smaller and men are generally larger. Since women are smaller, they have smaller heads than men, and thus smaller brains. It used to be believed that the size of your brain correlated to intelligence, and thus, that women are less intelligent than men- therefore incapable of dealing with real issues or doing anything even remotely intellectual. Once this scientific hypothesis was proven wrong, this belief about women began to fade away. This is one way biology and scientific theory has influenced the position of women in society, and played a role in feminism.
“Feyerbend therefore argues that we must “free society from the strangling hold of an ideologically petrified science just as our ancestors freed us from the strangling hold of the One True Religion! Science should be taught in schools, but only as a historical phenomenon alongside other ‘fairytales,’ such as the myths of so-called primitive societies which also seek to explain the natural and physical world”
Moran briefly touches upon the concept of “scientific socialism” in the fifth chapter of his book (Moran, 138). The Marx and Engels brand of socialism is sometimes referred to as a science because they both took pride in the fact that they developed their thesis by looking at the rise and fall of different socioeconomic trends throughout history, and developed what is commonly called as the “dialectic” of socialism. Not necessarily “empirical” evidence because there was no experiment that had been done, but still not “utopian” because it was based on actual analysis of human history. Continue reading “Socialist View of the Worker as Presented in Harvest Song”
The language Joe Moran uses in introductory to Interdisciplinarity chapter is vague and frivolous, first exemplified in his opening paragraph when he calls “how we organize knowledge into disciplines…stale, irrelevant, inflexible, or exclusory” (Moran 1). The words “irrelevant” and “inflexible” alone would have easily made Moran’s point. Moran, later in the introduction, excuses himself for his use of language by accusing the English language itself for not having words that are accurate enough to describe what he means by “interdisciplinarity” (14). But I am pretty sure that the real reason he finds it so difficult to explain himself is because in this day and age true interdisciplinarity is impossible.
We have too much information available for us not to classify knowledge into different disciplines. It used to be that science, economics, and philosophy were all studied under the umbrella term of “philosophy.” But once more information, theories, and discussions became about, this true interdisciplinarity became an old frame, and new categories evolved. The development of the scientific method eventually established a defined line between what is and is not science, thus pushing out other disciplines all together . The conversations in the individual discipline are too specific to be combined. Moran himself is guilty of this because the introduction to his book reads as if the target audience are members of his own discipline – philosophy. Throughout the introduction Moran makes unexplained allusions and references to philosophers and their philosophical works under the assumption that the reader is familiar with the works (Moran 9-13).
Additionally, it is the people who are making the most field advances, the most highly educated, who are also the most specialized. There is too much knowledge for there to be Renaissance Men like Leonardo DaVinci who made advances in every discipline. While it may do a science researcher a bit of good to take a writing class, so as to say, improve his or her research grant requests, I do not think it would be a good idea, for, say, an oncologist to study the works of Nietzsche. Although the analysis skills one would develop from studying literature could help anyone, from a mathematician to a salesman with everyday tasks, basic problem solving, communicating effectively, and even possibly in their own fields- the fact of the matter is that advances are made in specific fields by specialists. In order to better learn about our world and solve its many problems, we need specialization. An example of this would be a trip to your general practitioner’s office. Have an eye infection? You get referred to an Opthamologist. Worried about a skin rash? You see a dermatologist. Moran, himself, even makes my point saying that individuals who “limit themselves to certain closely defined fields and controlled situations…produce apparently clearer, more rigorous and effective samples of ‘useful knowledge’” (Moran 7).