A Place of Interaction

Abstract

The academic world has been habituated to an organization that emphasizes the autonomy of each discipline and the purity of its subject, while at the same time it exults in the self-evidence of the founding premises of any given discipline. In the academic domain that interface claims to belong, this habitual organization is realized as a distinct department for each European language/literature (i.e., Department of German, Department of French, Department of Spanish, Department of Classics, and so on), a fact that, when combined with the principle of autonomy mentioned above, usually leads the members of each of these separate departments to consider their work to be different, separate, and unrelated to the work of the members of the other departments of other languages.