During the past forty years, nothing has been more popular in the American university than “interdisciplinary work.” Too often, however, the appropriate prefix for “disciplinary” has been “non” rather than “inter.” Doing something “interdisciplinary” offers an expert in field X the opportunity to lavish ignorance on fields Y and Z. Nowhere has this been more evident than in literary people’s flirtations with economics and law, two of the disciplines most frequently paired with their own.
Stephen D. Cox
Stephen Cox is professor of literature and director of the humanities program at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of ”The Stranger Within Thee”: Concepts of the Self in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought (University of Michigan Press, 1992); The Titanic Story (Open Court, 1999); The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Transaction, 2004); The New Testament and Literature (Open Court, 2006); and The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison (Yale University Press, 2009).
