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I WANT TO CONSIDER HERE what I see as the place of interdisciplinary study in Canadian literary criticism.I It is my sense that much of what now passes for "interdisciplinarity" in the study of Canadian literary texts, whether explicitly identified as such or not, is hardly deserving of the name. Interdisciplinarity involves a radical questioning of the core assumptions of a discipline, and literary critics have been inadequately attentive to the ways in which a certain sense of the "literary" has in fact prevented a deeper analysis of the status and meaning of literary texts. The danger of making a claim such as this one is that it is apt to sound contradictory or tautological. So before I begin to assess the role of interdisciplinarity in contemporary Canadian literary criticism, I want to take a detour through Stanley Fish's "Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do," which presents perhaps the most well-known case against interdisciplinary studies. Though I think that Fish's criticisms are misplaced, a look at his attempt to grapple with interdisciplinarity is an especially helpful one, insofar as it can be used to establish what is at stake in interdisciplinary study, as well as to outline the limits and possibilities of a practice for which so much has been claimed.
The Politics of Interdisciplinarity
As is the case with so many other concepts that have proliferated in the academy over the past several decades, interdisciplinarity is the name for a whole set of often contradictory projects, positions, discourses, and desires. Just as with concepts such as "postmodernism" or "postcolonialism," it would thus be a mistake to set out to define interdisciplinarity once and for all in an effort to get at some core essence that would make all of the varied uses of the term suddenly clearer and less confusing. If interdisciplinarity begins, as Fish suggests, from "the assumption that the lines currently demarcating one field of study from another are not natural but constructed by interested parties who have a stake in preserving the boundaries that sustain their claims to authority" (232), it is important not to treat interdisciplinarity itself as a natural kind that can be easily identified and assigned a place in some taxonomy of academic practices; to do...