Literature, History, and Consilience

From a discussion in LinkedIn—on the continuity or consilience between historical and literary studies:

There is a continuum of approaches and objects of study between literary studies (e.g. the New Historicism, or more classical scholarly approaches) and historical disciplines "proper"--actually there does not exist anything like a solid block of methodologically unified discourses that we can call "history" as against "subjective" or more interpretive critical approaches to the cultural objects of the past. What we do find is more like a gamut of perspectives, or shades of gray everywhere. Certain kinds of understanding need to be interpretive or even speculative, otherwise their object does not even fall within the purview of "scientific" disciplines. Science is fine, but its scope in some areas is narrow or non-existent. And consilience between kinds of knowledge can only come about when the proper scope of each kind of knowledge is preserved; disciplines (whose borders, moreover, are fuzzy enough in the human sciences) cannot be reduced to each other's terms as we map them one against the other.

Consiliencia y retrospección

 

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