INTERDISCIPLINARY CRITICISM

General view

The foundations of the interdisciplinary critics lie in the intellectual discoveries of

various disciplines, primarily in the variety of new concepts offered by recent
development in the social sciences: psychology, sociology, philosophy. Interdisciplinary
Criticism is a criticism based on the belief that a work of art is best examined from the
viewpoint of a variety of disciplines: history, philosophy, political science, psychology,
sociology, anthropology.
Also, the approach called “intellectual history” or “history of ideas” is interdisciplinary.

The Interdisciplinary Critic believes that the objective reality changes all the time,
therefore the method must be suited to the object: it must be flexible, careful about the
theories of others, broad yet skeptical of its own theory. It seems quite a hard task, but
there are a lot of critics up to it. I will mention a few interdisciplinary critics: Ihab
Hassan, the critic of postmodernism, author of many books on the contemporary
phenomena:
The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1965), The Right
Promethean Fire (1980); The Postmodern Turn (1987).
Another interdisciplinary critic is Herbert Read, who wrote: Art and Society (1937), The
Philosophy of Modern Art (1952).
Other interdisciplinary critics are: Claude Levi-Strauss, with his famous Anthropologie
Structurale (1958), Johan Huizinga, with his well-known book Homo Ludens, Susan

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Sontag, author of criticism, fiction and film director. Among her books I mention:
Against Interpretation (1966), and the novel The Benefactor (1963).

The features of the Present Age

A few ideas have to be said about the Present Age and its characteristics.
1. We live in a civilization of the image. According to Richard Kearney, from his book
The Wake of Imagination (1988):
“We seem to have entered an age where reality is inseparable from the image, where the
original has been replaced by its imitation, where our understanding of this world is
preconditioned by the electronically reproducible media of television, cinema, video and
radio”.
And:
“The technological innovations in image reproductions have made the imaginary more
persuasive than the real world.”

Kearney gives examples to support these ideas: when we watch TV news, what happens
in a particular place is seen by millions of viewers all over the world; what we see in fact
is not reality as such, but reality filtered through the reporter’s perspective: the news
present shocking things, facts that would “catch the eye”.

The impact of the media changes our life, shapes it. For example, children do not read as
much as in the past. (Question: how do television, video, cinema shape our outlook on
life? What changes do the media bring to the way we perceive reality?)

2. The modern way of life is made up of new experiences, according to Susan Sontag, in
Against Interpretation.
These experiences are:
- extreme social and physical mobility (changing jobs, traveling);
- the crowdedness of the human scene (in the cities);

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 - the availability of new sensations such as speed (physical speed – in airplane
travel, or speed of images – in cinema, video).

3. Another aspect is plurality, or multiplicity , diversity.

In the United States, this refers first of all to the multiplicity of ethnic identities, who
express their specificity: American literature contains, apart from the canon, African
American literature, Jewish American literature, Hispanic American literature, etc.

There is another meaning of the concept of plurality, and this does not refer only to the
United States: plurality in social life. I refer to the woman’s role in society, which
increased considerably. Women have taken a more important role in social, economic and
political life. The feminist movement is quite developed in Western cultures. There is the
concept of the liberated woman: free of prejudices, conscious of her abilities, ready to
fully express her personality in the society, in the community. On of the schools of
literary criticism very active today is feminist criticism, which regards works of literature
from the feminist point of view, being sensitive to issues referring to the representations
of gender in literature.

4. Another aspect of the Present Age is expressed by Susan Sontag when she asserts that
the fundamental difference between the “two cultures”, the literary artistic and the
scientific no longer exists. The arguments for this apparently striking assertion are the
following:
- the parallel between the difficulty of contemporary art and that of modern science is
obvious. As examples, painters like Dali, or Jackson Pollock are “difficult”, also,
postmodern novelists, like John Barth, Thomas Pychon, Raymond Federman.
- another aspect that brings together scientific culture and art: the history-mindedness of
contemporary art – the most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references
to the history of the art they are part of. If the work is literary, it contains references, in
the form of irony or parody, to literary works or literary techniques of the past. If it is a
work of architecture, it may contain parts done in different styles. The technique of
allusion or quotation is very common in contemporary arts.

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5. Another characteristic of the Contemporary Age is fragmentation. Nietzsche
contributed to this view of the world when he declared that “God is dead”. He is
considered a predecessor of postmodernism. He also said: “There are no moral
phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena.” So, according to
him, everything is relative, there are no absolute points of reference.

The features of the Postmodern age

Ihab Hassan, one of the most prominent critics of postmodernism, enumerates the
following features of postmodernism, which are connected to the general aspect of
fragmentation. Our age could also be called the Postmodern age.
In his book The Postmodern Turn, Hassan refers to the following aspects:

a. The decenterment of man – the human being is no longer regarded as the centre of
the universe; scientists are preoccupied with discovering the skeletons of
dinosaurs, the dawns of life on earth, with life on other planets, with the existence
of alien forms of life, the fascination of encountering an alien civilization.
b. The demystification of reason – man’s reason is not capable of having a
comprehensive of total representation of reality, or of deciphering the meanings of
reality. We are surrounded by sophisticated machines and we do not know very
much about them, we have to cope with uncertainty.
c. The refusal of unity – if we cannot understand everything that happens around us,
we no longer have the feeling of living in a harmonious world. We see only
fragments, we do not see the whole picture.
d. The empty subject – this refers to the process of depersonalization, loss of identity
that the contemporary man experiences in life. This comes as a result of other
aspects shown above. An embodiment of this feature is represented in John
Barth’s novel The Floating Opera, where Todd Andrews is a lawyer who has no
belief in justice, and regards law as purely a game. He has no affective
connections with the world.

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Identity, psychologists say, is a matter of relations. Erwin Goffman, in The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life, speaks about the performing self. There is nothing behind it, he
says, we just assume different roles in our social existence. Only performance gives
validity to the self. In other words, you are what you do.
Robert Lifton, in Protean Man, asserts that performance might validate yourself.
According to him, an identity is a function, interpreting somebody else’s identity, and a
space of relations.
Hence the importance of dialogue. Communication is the only way, in contemporary life,
in which we can establish meaningful connections with the others, an image of ourselves
and a way to avoid the dangers of contemporary society: alienation, the loss of self-
respect, the loss of the respect of others, as a consequence.

Further approaches to literature and culture: Deconstruction

Deconstruction was a vigilant reaction against the tendency in structuralist thought to

“imobilise” the meaning of the text, as Jacques Derrida demonstrates in his most
powerful essays.

In this sense, deconstruction is ‘post-structuralist’, as it refuses to accept the idea of

structure as in any sense given or objectively ‘there’ in a text.

Deconstruction questions the assumption that structures of meaning correspond to a

pattern of the mind, through which we make things intelligible. From the structuralist
point of view, theory would be a search for invariant structures or formal universals
which reflect the very nature of human intelligence. Human thought and culture could
thus be explained and understood. Theory claims a deep, universal kinship, or relation
with the meaning that it proposes to analyse.

Lect.dr. Aura Sibisan