Incidentally, what happens if the cognitive bits you’re inviting into the Department of Everything Studies implies that disciplinarity matters to learning?

http://long18th.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/autobiography-travel-writing-and-everything-studies/

Best wishes,

DM

Because knowledge is found in patterns of detail. Constraints narrow the field so that you can accumulate a critical mass of detail. At the same time we need the freedom of multiply shifting conceptual lenses because different lenses pick out different kinds of detail and thus reveal different patterns.

And if these choices are heuristic, that means they’re particular to the moment of study–in the field in general, yes, there might be animation aesthetics, the industry of Latin American music, and cultural representations in Russian novels. You wouldn’t expect students to know or study that all, but neither would you want them (or their professors) to make a final statement that excludes one or the other of those from the Everything Studies Department for some principled or theoretical reason.

One key advantage of bounding the object of study is that it forces students to think about the same type of cultural practice using different lenses – studying Bugs Bunny in terms of industrial history vs. cultural representations vs. formal craft. Otherwise, students might study animation aesthetics, the industry of Latin American music, cultural representations in Russian novels, etc. – how could that be presented as coherent to students? Can you just present a range of methods without some sense of a shared object of analysis?

Seriously, though, I do think that disciplines provide useful heuristic points of reference for making such judgements.

(Not that they save us from their ultimate subjectivity or anything like that. We absolutely should be modest about this. Disciplinary histories are useful tools, as you say. They’re not religions.)

I’m married to a musicologist, and I know that, while there are some types of musicological work I can appreciate, there are others that I just can’t – I simply don’t have the training.

I think that disciplinarization and departmentalization are also in their way forces for pluralism in the academy – they give a measure of institutional protection to the distinctiveness of smaller, quirkier areas like religious studies and classics, which might otherwise get trampled by the 800-pound ubergorillas of English and History.

(Classics also is a field which offers a fair amount of what you want. Anything goes within our chronological and geographical range, and the reception of same outside that. At least in principle, and to some extent in practice. It’s what attracted me to the field, in fact.)

I can see that, if one started from scratch, it would make sense for classics to be a interdisciplinary program, scattered across a number of departments. Like medieval studies tends to be. I’m selfishly glad we’re not.

When I say smattering, the only thing I want to avoid is inviting in the kind of cognitivism that is aggressively dismissive or wildly reductive about hermeneutics, of which I think there is sadly more than a little. That and bad evo-psych of which I also think there is unfortunately quite a lot of. But I’m 100% in agreement that we need a lot more attention to mind, brain, vision, embodiment (in the natural science sense, not the neo-Foucauldian sense), and so on when we study culture.

I like that course sketch.

In any event, my response to the Bauerlein discussion was to sketch out a graduate course in the theory of literature (which is not the same thing as literary theory) moves from texts to groups to history in which I consider to be an intellectually contempory fashion. It doesn’t cover all the disciplinary and conceptual bases (it wasn’t designed to do that), but it’s plenty broad enough for a single semester. Some of the cognitive science issues get talked about in the comments.

You might also check out Chris’s discussion of Extended Cognition and Literary Criticism at Mixing Memory.

Jerry, religion departments do seem to have that nice mix of people who do ethnography, sociology, hermeneutics, etcetera. A good model, I agree.