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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