Toward Harmony
Exploring the Therapeutic Potential of Reading: How Interdisciplinary Methodologies Can Expand the Remit of Literary Studies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelda Green
This paper sets out the findings of a series of empirical studies into the therapeutic potential of reading. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate some of the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary study and to explore the implications of developing research methodologies which utilise a combination of tools that are rooted in scientific and literary study. In the reading experiments that will be presented here as case studies, participants took part in exercises that included diary-assisted reading, letter writing and reflective interviews. Each experiment was designed to help illuminate and capture the often illusive and oblique processes that take place when a person reads a work of literature. The principles of practical criticism provided an important guide in the development of these experiments and in the analysis of the empirical data that was collected through them. Equally, interdisciplinary working with clinical and theoretical psychologists helped to shape the experimental methodologies. It was important that throughout the processes of designing the experimental methodologies, carrying out the studies and analysing findings that both disciplines of psychology and literary studies where being challenged and stretched by the other. How can the practical applications of literature and the arts be captured, understood and communicated? How does psychology contend with the unspoken, ephemeral and unclassifiable stuff of the mind? This paper provides a blueprint for the ongoing development of interdisciplinary work between the disciplines of psychology and literature, with wider implications for scholars across the humanities who are embarking on interdisciplinary research.
Grateful Dead Studies: A Transdisciplinary Discipline
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stan Spector
In the first part of this paper, I review Minati and Collen’s argument that “trans-disciplinarity” is a phase of knowledge through which human beings work to synthesize a collection of details “giving them meaning and harmony within a global view.” I then show how the scholarship devoted to the Grateful Dead is an example of transdisciplinary knowledge. Grateful Dead Studies originated in conferences where different scholars from different disciplines presented papers with varying foci reflecting the presenter’s specific discipline. At these conferences, the authors interacted with each other and engaged in interdisciplinary discussions, that is, they were participating in a “dialogue between and across disciplines.” Some of these disciplines were in the Humanities, but not all. The Social Sciences as well as disciplines as disparate as law, economics, and even acoustics and technology were also represented. Although the discussions among Grateful Dead scholars seemed to be a multidisciplinary one, the focus of our research was no longer about the particular objects delineated by our specific disciplines. Now, we were engaged, as Minati and Collen argued, in the project of synthesizing the collection of details culled from the individual studies about specific aspects of the Grateful Dead. This synthesis generated a new object of study incorporating the entire array of details of the Grateful Dead phenomenon that is the object of a transdisciplinary study. And so, Grateful Dead Studies can be used as model illustrating Minati and Collen’s argument about the formation of a new transdisciplinary domain of knowledge.
Divine Methods in Black Women’s and Black Queer History
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ava Purkiss, Jennifer Dominique Jones
Our joint paper examines underrecognized and underappreciated methods in Black feminist history. We explore the research methods of Black women’s history and Black queer history to mark their particular and shared investigative modes. By asserting that historical methods are a technique or set of procedures that scholars use to analyze primary sources, we challenge the common equivalence of “sources” with “methods.” We index four practices—historical imagination, inference, suspicion, and witnessing—as foundational and important research methods of Black feminist history. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the particularity of historical methods and the relationship between Black feminist thought and Black queer inquiry. We reviewed classic texts in Black women’s history and Black queer history, examined newer and less cited literature in these fields, and engaged methodological and philosophical meditations on the field of history. In this way, secondary sources served as our primary sources and our method involved placing these disparate pieces of writing, from as early as 1946 to as recent as 2023, in meaningful conversation about historical research approaches. By articulating these Black feminist methods, we seek to center historical methods as an essential and generative set of tools for humanists to rigorously engage with archival source material often marked by silence, elisions, and violence. By turning our attention to Black feminist historical methods, we challenge the marginalization of historical inquiry within Black feminist studies writ large.
