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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ayelet zohar graduate student porter institute of semiotics and poetics tel aviv university e-mail:ayelet.zohar-AT-ipc.co.il --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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