In(ter)discipline

"'Interdisciplinarity' has dynamised the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? What are the advantages, the difficulties, and risks? Another challenge concerns language: if single disciplines have produced their own technologies of reading and writing, this book examines and breaks the routine to propose alternative languages. Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism, both established and upcoming, from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking. The challenge has been to reach beyond the jargon and the epistemological constraints of individual disciplines while remaining coherent and incisive. The outcome successfully reveals new links between different forms of cultural expression. Gillian Beer (English Literature, Science Writing), Malcolm Bowie (French Literature, Psychoanalysis) and Beate Perrey (Music, Poetry, Psychoanalysis) are the instigators of the interdisplinary research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-Currents and Resistances, which since 2002 has been under the auspices of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge."

Gillian Beer

1. What If? The Language of Affect 2. Nuisance Value 3. Borges's Blindness and Giacometti's Eyes 4. Wittgenstein's Chopin: Interdisciplinarity and 'the Music Itself' 5. Preserving the Performance: Scholarship as Art? 6. Echoing the 'Mortal Ear': Orfeo's Indiscipline 7. Is Music Criticism Criticism? 8. Modernist Futures 9. Conversation, Sport, or Hatchet Job? Criticism and the Power of Metaphor 10. Set Adrift in Style: The Scholar as Fiction and Film-Maker in Jacob's Room 11. Languages for Learning to Delight in Art 12. Loopholes in Performance 13. Etymology and its Others 14. Yves Bonnefoy's Récits en rêve: The Intersection of Creativity and Critique 15. On Touching: War, Art, and the Realm of the Senses 16. Snapshots from the Hereafter: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Critic as Photographer 17. Faith and Doubt: An Alternative Dialectic 18. Literature and the Theory of Games: Kleist's Verlobung in St Domingo as an Example 19. Towards Discursive Discipline: Dance beyond Metaphor in Critical Writing 20. Interdisciplinarity and Public Engagement