Interdisciplinarity and Cultural Contexts

Abstract

For those who teach nineteenth-century literature, both the past and future lives of novels matter deeply. Perhaps that is why so many of us teach novels that resonate with aesthetic, ethical, economic, social, and political issues we currently confront. Studying novels through the lens of legal, religious, or medical history invites students to consider how nineteenth-century literature engaged with its immediate world. At the same time, interdisciplinary approaches offer students a sense of their own history as they grasp both distinctions from and continuities with the past. In this essay, I begin by surveying conventional interdisciplinary approaches in the classroom, with an eye to their advantages and limitations. Then, I turn to two classroom activities that encourage students themselves to make choices and judgements about the benefits of studying nineteenth-century fiction in interdisciplinary contexts. While these activities would work with many texts, Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula self-consciously references the contexts in which it was written, including the professions of law and medicine; disciplines of knowledge from theology to psychology; and technologies from the typewriter to the telegraph. Dracula’s progeny – the innumerable plays, films, comic books, and postmodern re-workings in fiction – further contextualize print in the fields of sound and sight.