Trading Tunes with Stanley Fish: Grand Unification Theories and the Practice of Literature and Science

Abstract

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.