American Schools of Interdisciplinarity: History and Literature Programs and Their Early Twentieth-Century Traditions

Interdisciplinary study, because it runs counter to the dominant culture of specialization and professionalization upheld within the modern research university, is often presented as an innovative and experimental renegotiation of an outdated organization of knowledge. This essay qualifies such claims about the forward-looking ambitions of interdisciplinarity by examining the institutional history and traditions which they tend to obscure. Taking on the special case of the study of American literature, this essay argues that its belated recognition as a discipline, in the 1920s, framed it in the meantime as the one remaining province of the generalist amidst the rise of expertise that had come to characterize academic culture as of the end of the nineteenth century. If this delay helps explain ongoing commitments to an interdisciplinary study of American literature and history, the essay shows more specifically how this interdisciplinary project is buttressed by references to scholars and programs from the early twentieth century, a moment which is cast not as the decisive turn towards disciplinarity but as the last moment of indecision in which to recover the dissident forms, methods and pedagogy of interdisciplinarity. Even while interdisciplinarity seems to "teach itself", relinquishing the narrow set of tools and methods through which a discipline trains its practitioners, it is by acknowledging some of the backwards-looking trends in the interdisciplinary study of history and literature in America that we can recover the ideals of scholarship it seeks to transmit.