Seminar Description Organized intellectual pursuit in the West is a story of increasing specialization and fragmentation. As areas of inquiry continue to become highly differentiated and technical, disciplinarians, submerged in idiosyncratic discourse communities, have difficulty communicating with colleagues in subspecialties and with, perhaps more importantly, an impatient tax-paying public.
Interdisciplinary training is seen as a way to overcome the disabilities bred of specialization.
The Pandora's Box of modern interdisciplinarity was accidentally opened in the first sentence of a book written to be published as part of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The class will examine the development of disciplinary boundaries and evaluate the success or failure of appropriating the methods of one discipline for the study, and revitalization, of the subject matter in another discipline. Finally, we will look the possibilities interdisciplinarity holds for integrating, and downsizing, traditional academic disciplines. This is an official page of the Department of English Graduate Program.