File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 150


Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1998 01:35:00 +0200
From: ayelet zohar <ayelet.zohar-AT-ipc.co.il>
Subject: Re: interdiciplinarity


At 10:40 08/04/98 +0000, you wrote:
>Could the person (or whoever who knows) who posted the recommendation 
>on interdisciplinarity and interdiciplinary methodology please post 
>it to me? I accidently erased it before I took details down. 
>
>Thanks in advance, 
>Gail
>U of Dundee
>
>
>     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>

Dear all,

Apologies for interrupting existing threads.

I recently consulted  Julie Thompson Klein's book on Interdisciplinarity
for a paper I was writing and have subsequently been reading it with
great interest. I am so impressed by it that I want to recommend it as
widely as possible.

The details of the book are as follows:

Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.  ISBN: 0-8143-2087-2.

As the title suggests, this is a book that attempts to excavate the
history, theory and practices of interdisciplinarity.  What marks it off
as a work of serious scholarship is its amazing historical depth.
Klein traces the history of the term to classical times and proceeds slowly
into
the present, all the time highlighting the key debates around the term and
other cognate discourses such as "integrative knowledge" and
"multidisciplinarity".  Her writing style is unobtrusive and highly
accessible.  However, what struck me most forcefully about the book was
the fact that it seemed to be able to answer EVERY QUESTION I HAD EVER HAD
ON THE SUBJECT.  And this not just from the perspective of literary
studies or the humanities.  She does an excellent job of pursuing the
debate in the sciences and showing the various forms in which
interdisciplinary approaches have shaped the quest for knowledge.  At the
end of the book is one of the most comprehensive bibliographies on any
subject I have ever seen.  Reading it, I was put in mind of Wayne Booth's
path-breaking The Rhetoric of Fiction, which was conceived of on much the
same lines and provided one of the most comprehensive surveys of
the subject at the time of its publication.  Booth's book is no longer
much referenced in the field, but I regularly dip into it and suggest it
to my students for its encyclopedic analysis of the minutest questions in 
the literary criticism of fiction.  

Klein's book is in a similar league. It is a remarkable 
piece of scholarship and deserves to be read by anyone who has ever
thought about interdisciplinary work.  I recommend it highly and hope that
people will be willing to discuss the numerous pedagogical and research
issues that it raises


Ato Quayson


PS-- I would be very interested in getting in touch with Julie Klein.  If
any of you out there knows how one might achieve this, I would be obliged
if you could communicate with me privately.

**********************************
Dr Ato Quayson
Lecturer in English and Fellow
Pembroke College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge CB2 1RF
UK
Tel: +(44) 1223 338145
Fax: +(44) 1223 338163






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ayelet zohar
graduate student
porter institute of semiotics and poetics
tel aviv university

e-mail:ayelet.zohar-AT-ipc.co.il




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