The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History, and Literature

Abstract

JULIA V. DOUTHWAITE AND MARY VIDAL, eds. The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History, and Literature. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005. 312 pp.Reviewed by Denise Amy BaxterInterdisciplinarity is a keyword for contemporary scholarship and teaching practices across academe. Universities tout their programs; journals publicize their scopes; academics are urged from all directions to think outside disciplinary boundaries and to embrace approaches. The mission statement for this journal explains that Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies provides a venue for exchange between scholars in . . . traditionally diverse and that it boundaries that separate such traditional scholarly disciplines while also bringing those disciplines into contact with each other. In their edited volume, The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth- Century Art, History, and Literature, Julia V. Douthwaite, Professor of French at University of Notre Dame, Mary Vidal, an art historian in Department of Visual Arts at University of California at San Diego, and their fine American, French, and British contributors work toward definitions of this oft-used term, its implications for contemporary scholarship, and its origins in eighteenth-century intellectual practices.Rising out of panels that Douthwaite chaired at annual meetings of American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Modern Language Association, and that Douthwaite and Vidal chaired together at College Art Association, volume challenges its readers to rethink nature of what may be most broadly termed interdisciplinary scholarship. Taking as their premise that approaches to eighteenth are desirable, necessary, and inevitable, Douthwaite, Vidal, and scholars from fields of literature, history, and art history who were ultimately commissioned to participate in volume demonstrate in various ways that eighteenth or, more broadly speaking, Enlightenment era-long perceived of as originating site of division of knowledge that would develop into disciplinary practices, whipping boy of Postmodernism-was truly itself an interdisciplinary century (xiv). The volume should therefore be seen in conjunction with other recent engagements with relationship between Enlightenment era and Postmodernism: Daniel Gordon's Postmodernism and Enlightenment (2000); Hugo Anthony Meynell's Postmodernism and New Enlightenment (2000); and Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill's What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (2001). Yet its explicit focus on disciplines of art, history, and literature also makes it an excellent teaching text for humanities classroom.The book is comprised of both position papers and case studies, yet editors have chosen to organize essays thematically rather than by genre, with intention of revealing the breadth of opinions and practices that mark scholarship today (xxv). A quick examination of book's six sections will indeed demonstrate wide range of approaches to concept and practice of interdisciplinarity among contemporary scholars of eighteenth century. The essays by Daniel Rosenberg, James D. Herbert, Isabelle Michel-Evrard, and Mimi Hellman in first section, Knowledge networks and 'undisciplined objects,' engage with what has long been perceived as Enlightenment's ultimate disciplinary text, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie, only to complicate canonical text's status yet again. In Rescuing trivial, art historians Mary Sheriff and Jennifer Milam demonstrate ways in which rococo style, with its associations with femininity and ludic, has been coded as frivolous, and they point to new modes of interpretation. …