These employment-related motives reinforce the general trend to discuss literature in its cultural context. At the same time, several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are focusing more on breadth and interdisciplinary scholarship. Sociologists, political scientists, and economists, have voiced concern that the popular concentration on methodological issues has left the geographic areas untended. Graduate students in these disciplines are again showing interest in a geographic concentration. It should not surprise us, then, that graduate programs in foreign-culture studies have been initiated at several universities.
Turtles have resilient shells and grow quite old unless, of course, they are upended.
Research of the participating faculty members usually centers on only one of the cooperating disciplines. Attempts to lower the hurdle by concentrating on disciplines close to our own, such as philosophy or the history of art, often narrow the scope of a program. Efforts are under way to formulate a first consensus, a profile of culture studies. Culture-studies publications are, and by necessity will be for some time, more programmatic than substantive. Perhaps the practice of culture-studies instruction at any level is not yet sufficiently consolidated to permit a cohesive graduate curriculum.