Complex Dynamics

A wager: postdisciplinarity will be to the 1990s what deconstruction was to the 1980s. This bet will, no doubt, offer scant comfort to those who thought it was safe to go back into the classroom, that historynew, old, or repackaged-had re-emerged to provide a basis from which to hold forth on Milton, Blake, Shelley, and other canonical figures. Postdisciplinarity has not yet caught on as a catchphrase nor sharply etched itself on the collective critical consciousness as a sequel to interdisciplinary study. But with postmodernism, post-Marxism, and other posts now seeming a bit shopworn, postdisciplinarity stands a fair chance of emerging in the next decade as a radical force that will extend questions debated by literary theorists in the 1980s to a wide range of disciplines-specifically, the natural sciences-in the 1990s. Because there is still an ongoing debate about precisely what theory achieved in the 1980s, it seems difficult to predict what postdisciplinary study will mean ten years from now or, more crucially, what the disciplines themselves-literature, history, psychology, philosophy, physics, biology, and so forth-will look like; what insti

Consciousness · Epistemology · Postmodernism · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Engineering · Modern American Literature Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

• Pump and Circumstance

  Open Access•Steven Shapin•Social Studies of Science•1984

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• Chaos as Orderly Disorder

  N Katherine Hayles•New Literary History•1989

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