The study of English literature is already diverse and multi-disciplinary. It has left the strictures of formalism and new criticism behind and now studies far more than ‘the form, structure and rhetoric of texts’. According to the English Benchmark statement, it now looks at ‘their social provenance, the cultures of which they are a part and in which they intervene, and their treatment of ideas and material shared with other subject areas’. (1) In addition to an emphasis on material culture, English has also taken upon itself the mantle of philosophy and tries to grapple with some of the ontological and epistemological questions of our time. This short paper contains a few preliminary thoughts triggered by a recent event organised by the Higher Education Academy on the topic of interdisciplinary dialogue. (2) It takes three examples of interdisciplinary teaching and learning from my own institution’s English Literature honours degree programme and explores them to reflect on the nature of the encounter between English and other disciplines. The main way in which English students encounter other disciplines is through the study of primary source material. My first example is from a Romanticism level two module which makes extensive use of art, amongst other disciplines, to enrich students’ understanding in three ways. Through the exploration of art and music we examine the meaning of the term ‘Romanticism’, in particular the time frames with which it is often associated. Through watercolours and oil paintings we investigate visual presentations of themes germane to the Romantic period. For example, the idea of the sublime is investigated by looking at the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, their emphasis on rugged mountainscapes echoing the interests of the lake poets. Friedrich’s interest in moonscapes neatly chimes with that of Wordsworth in the Lucy poems. Girtin’s watercolours offer insight into the presentation of ruins pertinent to the Gothic novel and to poems such as Wordsworth’s Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
Portraiture such as Haydon’s depictions of Napoleon and Wellington is compared with works by Friedrich and related to themes of the individual and solitude seminal in the Romantic period. Finally, we use art to explore historical background – Delacroix for the idea of Revolution and what it might mean, Joseph Wright of Derby’s paintings for the impact of the industrial revolution, Reynolds for the cult of celebrity (linked of course with the idea of the value of the individual). So what are we to make of this interdisciplinary exchange? It is certainly stimulating, broadening the horizons of the students, deepening their understanding and providing access to different epistemologies and alternate perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches such as these have also acted as catalysts for more innovative teaching and learning methods. At BGC, for example, there is excellent use of the VLE to support learning of this kind, as tutors use the new technologies to provide audio, visual, and textual sources to supplement their own teaching. But there is more to interdisciplinarity than the accumulation of useful teaching materials. Disciplines are discourses and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism sheds light on what happens when discourses encounter each other. Dialogue may appear on the surface to be either friendly or hostile, convergent or divergent, but Bakhtin suggests that at a deeper level there is always a struggle for influence. When discourses meet, they are not willing to be drowned out by the other, unless they have no choice. Speakers will indeed listen carefully to each other, but they do so in order to inform and reinforce their own discursive position. Naturally, all participants in the dialogue are playing the same game and the result is rarely one discourse winning and the other being silenced. Instead, the outcome is what Bakhtin calls ‘dialogized heteroglossia’, which is the ‘co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and past [...] between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth’. (3) This neatly describes the outcome of interdisciplinary dialogue.
The English scholar’s encounter with other disciplines will not, therefore, be quite as open as might at first be thought, since any dialogue will inevitably involve a power struggle. Not all interdisciplinary encounters are the same, however, and the dialogic dynamic will vary accordingly. To simplify, for the purpose of this short paper, there appear to be two types of interdisciplinary exchange. The first is when the partner discipline is rendered passive, such as when textual or visual resources are used to illuminate a literary text, something relatively common in the discipline of English. The Romanticism module described above appears, on the surface, to conform to this defi nition. We are aware of this issue, but see it as part of developing students’ understanding of interdisciplinary work. (The other two examples from BGC described below are at level three and offer the students alternative models of interdisciplinary study.) In this first case the other discipline can become truly the ‘other’ in the sense used by Edward Said. (4) In cases like this, the danger exists that the other discipline is silenced and exploited by English for its own purposes. The way the source is used lies very much in the hands of the tutor and the students. It is possible for the discipline to be presented as somewhat exotic or mysterious and there may even be an imperialistic undertone in which the enquiring discipline (here English) seeks to take what it wants from the other (in this case Art). Obviously the intellectual integrity of the academic staff, their understanding of the other discipline and their knowledge of the kind of exchange in which they are taking part will to some extent counter this tendency, but given the linguistic dynamic of dialogue, it needs to be recognised and explicitly acknowledged. The second type of dialogic encounter is when a speaker from the second discipline enters the classroom to actively engage in literal dialogue with ‘English’ speakers. This happens in BGC’s level three Modernism module, where tutors are brought in from the Art and Music Departments to speak to and with the students about their discipline’s view of modernism. They bring with them source material (images and sounds), but more than this, they explain how
their discipline interprets and makes sense of them, revealing and advocating their own epistemologies and using their specialist disciplinary languages. In this case the other discipline has a more powerful and persuasive voice. English is less likely to be able to make what it wants of Art and is more likely to be troubled and changed by what it encounters. It makes the interdisciplinary encounter more open-ended, untidy and exciting. Maggi Savin-Baden is in favour of such an approach, because she believes that our curricula are ‘over-signatured’ and excessively authored. (5) She suggests that we should present students with more dialogic, research-led learning. Letting students hear directly from tutors in other disciplines is one way of achieving this kind of dialogue. Where does this leave interdisciplinary dialogue? It indicates that like all other forms of teaching and learning, interdisciplinary methods are neither essentially good nor bad. Certainly, they enrich the students’ learning experience, because they open the student to new sources and perspectives, but they also have wider implications for the future of our own disciplines. Interdisciplinary dialogue can be used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to reinforce our own disciplinary discourse. It can allow English to define itself in relation to other disciplines rather as Said argued the British reinforced their own rational, civilised identity by interpreting the oriental other as their opposite. Arthur Applebee similarly argues in favour of a dialogic approach to university learning and views, in the words of the title of his book, the curriculum as a ‘conversation’. (6) Such an approach, he suggests, draws students further into the practices, mind-set and culture of the discipline in question. In this case, it can have the effect of helping the student become a fully acculturated English scholar. Alternatively, interdisciplinary approaches can be used to change our very mind-set and to move us on from our existing understanding of what it is to be English scholars.
This approach is as exciting as it is risky, because we are not certain where the encounter will take us and there is the possibility that our English identity will become ‘diluted’ (a word with negative connotations) or, more positively, ‘transformed’. Interdisciplinary dialogue can, therefore, have two quite different effects: it can both deconstruct and reinforce the discipline of English literature. In my final example, I describe how it can be left to students to negotiate the verbal agon and choose the kind of encounter they have with the other discipline. In my own level three Postmodernism module, studied at the very end of their degree, students take part in assessed interdisciplinary dialogue. Learning outcomes, teaching methodology, content and assessment practices are all aligned, in the manner advocated by John Biggs, to promote and support deep learning. (7) Students take turns to lead a seminar on aspects of postmodern culture. They select a topic from any of the diverse manifestations of postmodern culture, such as music, painting, installations, photography, fi lm, television, advertising, heritage, theatre and so on, and relate it to an aspect of literature. They are assessed on their ability to lead one seminar and engage in discussions that are, in turn, led by their peers. (8) It is not only their level of understanding that is marked, but the dialogic process that they adopt as they relate English Literature to these other cultural discourses. They are engaged, in microcosm, in grappling with exactly the dilemma that has been raised here, which is the problem of using other disciplines to open their minds to new ways of thinking about English literature without allowing the other discipline to deconstruct their emerging discipline identity. The exchange is always as unpredictable as it is thought-provoking – perhaps like all close interdisciplinary encounters.
Notes
1. Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, ‘English Benchmark Statement’, 2000 (available online at http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/honours/english.asp).
2. ‘Disciplines in Dialogue’, York, 5 December 2005. ‘Disciplines in Dialogue II’, an international conference on interdisciplinarity building on the work of the event in York, will be held at Birmingham on 13-14 July 2006 http://www.llas.ac.uk/events/llaseventitem.aspx?resourceid=2459).
3. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Vincent Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (London: Norton, 2001), 1190-1220 (1199, 1213).
4. Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’, in Leitch, Norton, 1221-2012.
5. Maggi Savin-Baden, ‘Research-led Learning and Troublesome Knowledge: Identity, Pedagogy and Power’, New Perspectives on Research into Higher Education, SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education) Conference, Edinburgh, 2005.
6. A. N. Applebee, Curriculum as Conversation: Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
7. John Biggs, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Buckingham: SRHE and Oxford University Press, 1999).
8. Sally Bentley, Methodology and Criteria for Two Types of ‘Innovative’ Assessment: Discussions and Displays. Case Study 1: Discussions (Lincoln: English Subject Centre and Bishop Grosseteste College, 2003), available online at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/assess/assess1.php.
