Book Reviews: Literature and the New Interdisciplinarity: Poetics, Linguistics, History, Dutch Quarterly Review Studies in Literature 14, by Roger D. Sell and Peter Verdonk (eds), 1994, Rodopi, Amsterdam pp. 257 ISBN 90-5183-609-0 (pb)
Abstract
Book ReviewsLiterature and the New Interdisciplinarity: Poetics, Linguistics, History, Dutch Quarterly Review Studies in Literature 14, by Roger D. Sell and Peter Verdonk (eds), 1994, Rodopi, Amsterdam pp. 257 ISBN 90-5183-609-0 (pb) SAGE Publications, Inc.1995DOI: 10.1177/096394709500400310 Monika Fludemik University of Freiburg, Germany This is a collection of thirteen original essays by international scholars working in the areas of 'language and literature', literary stylistics and literary pragmatics. Like many practitioners in this field, the editors, especially Roger Sell in the introduction, claim that a new period of not only peaceful, co-existence but of fruitful collaboration is upon us, overcoming formerly entrenched positions of antagonism and distrust between literary scholars and linguists. This new era of interdisciplinarity has been hailed for some time and has in fact been with us since the Russian formalist analyses of literary language; the claim that literature and linguistics have finally become bed-fellows again is more of a rhetorical ploy than a really revolutionary development on the academic scene. On the other hand, institutionalisation in the university still tends to create linguistic and literary halves of departments if only as a consequence of increasing specialisation and the daunting task of becoming proficient in the'other methodologies