Trading Tunes with Stanley Fish: Grand Unification Theories and the Practice of Literature and Science
Description
Stanley Fish has charged that literary critics who begin from epistemological relativism
cannot escape the constraints of their discipline by appealing to such assumptions and then go on to
interdisciplinary inquiries and claim for them the authority and importance that disciplinary claims
usually get. Literature and science, especially as it draws on physicists working toward grand
unification theories, offers an example of how crossing disciplinary boundaries can pursue
transcendent questions without losing the authority that disciplines offer or suppressing the
important perspectives that epistemological relativism has to offer. David Bohm's Wholeness and
the Implicate Order (1980) suggests how a unified theory can include within itself the flexibility to
take into account the discontinuities that Fish sees as the major obstacles to interdisciplinarity.
Citation
Turner, Richard C. "Trading Tunes with Stanley Fish: Grand Unification Theories and the Practice of Literature and Science." Issues in Integrative Studies 9 (1991): 113-125.
Date
1991