Abstract
This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature. This approach is situated within the universal framework of General Education or Liberal Arts, which in turn derives its essential inspiration from medieval and ancient learning. On the one hand, the various recent efforts to work transdisciplinarily are outlined and discussed; on the other, a selection of medieval narratives and one modern German novel plus one eighteenth-century ode are examined to illustrate how a transdisciplinary approach could work productively in order to innovate the principles of the modern university or all academic learning, putting the necessary tools of twenty-first century epistemology into the hands of the new generation. The specific angle pursued here consists of drawing from the world of medieval philosophy and literature as a new launching pad for future endeavors.
Highlights
This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature
Instead of anxiously observing the traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to protect one’s own scholarly territory, we are suddenly hearing calls to break down those long-cherished walls between departments and to restructure the entire university system based on completely different concepts, basically a call to return to the ideas as they had been originally conceived by such major philosophers, educators, and founders as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835, Berlin University), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826, University of Virginia), and Daniel Coit Gilman (1831–1908; Harvard University)
After all, when we study such famous authors as Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Dante Alighieri, Juan Ruiz, Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Johann von Tepl, and Heinrich Kaufringer, or the various poets of the Icelandic Sagas, we are dealing with fictional texts but with literary mirrors of lived reality, though fractured through the imaginary lens, as modern critics have noted repeatedly (Vargas Llosa 1990; Eco 1993)
Summary
Much has already been said regarding transdisciplinarity in recent years It appears to be a highly exciting new approach in academic research developing bridges between even the most distant fields of investigation in order to reach a higher level of hermeneutics and epistemology, certainly highly desirable for the twenty-first century thirst for new synergies and innovative research. Education (as we call it today) as a university study topic, and academic freedom at large, and we should consider their insights highly innovative and productive today Their pedagogical ideals launched a whole new world of advanced academic learning and research, deeply predicated on transdisciplinarity (though without the use of that word ), and since we are marching toward a new paradigm at the present time, our educational system once again requires innovation, open perspectives, and, to highlight the key aspect once again, transdisciplinary methods and approaches. Departmental or disciplinary boundaries have obviously been the result of academic exigencies conforming to bureaucratic principles in modern times since the second half of the twentieth century, but they are not necessarily beneficial to the exploration of new perspectives, materials, data, and images nor are they contributing to the improvement of academic teaching and research (Rousseau et al 2018; Von Sass 2019; Bołtuć 2021)
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