File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9707, message 49


Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 11:57:51 -0400
From: Brian Connery <connery-AT-Oakland.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Fish


>What's the point?  Okay, someone practicing two or more disciplines is
>actually creating a new discipline.  What are Fish's motives for stating
>the obvious?

I suppose there are many points, depending upon the claims that people are
making on the grounds of their interdisciplinariness.

The major point is that when one integrates principles from multiple
disciplines one must do it without contradiction and one must do it so that
it adds up to a unified approach; that is, it's not a matter of just
picking and choosing some stuff here and some stuff there.  

I was interested in Fish's talk because at that time I was working in a
"writing-in-the-disciplines" program.  I taught writing courses that were
connected to courses in other departments--zoology, psychology, education,
&c, and did workshops for both faculty and students on writing in a variety
of disciplines.  Some of my colleagues in the program, claiming to be
"interdisciplinary," attempted to pose as historians, psychologists, &c.
This, I opposed, on pretty much Fish's grounds.  What we taught, I argued,
was not "history" but "history writing"--which is its own discipline.  From
"history," we borrowed epistemology (what counts as knowledge, what the
rules of evidence are) and rhetorical conventions (organization, style
sheets); from composition theory, we borrowed what's now sometimes called
the new rhetoric--i.e., post-structural approaches to writing and reading.  

In other words, while some of my colleagues took pride in their knowledge
of the discipline in which they were teaching writing, and lectured
students on topics within that discipline (e.g., mitosis), I found such
matter completely irrelevant to what I was doing--or, at least, not was
important as the rhetoric of process analysis.

The tendency of my colleagues strikes me as one that's not uncommon among
those who claim "interdisciplinariness"--which too often comes down to
someone who's a literary critic reading a few books on, say, chaos theory,
and then lecturing more benighted critics on that theory.  In some cases,
what they're doing is still rather standard run-of-the-mill literary
criticism, in spite of their claims of interdisciplinariness.  In other
cases, what they're doing doesn't add up--it's a hodge podge of bad
criticism and bad chaos theory.  The goal, on the contrary, should be a
unified discipline--chaos criticism, or some such.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Brian Connery
connery-AT-oakland.edu
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

   

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