Questions:

 

1. What role does interdisciplinary work play in American Studies?
2. Would Smith agree with the statement that all literature should be classified as interdisciplinary?
3. How should we understand works that have changed over time (Zamora's examples of Spanish American colonial literature that were written at the time as histories)? Are they interdisciplinary? Are they works of cultural studies?
4. What is the line between cultural studies and interdisiplinary studies?
5. In respect to the potential for cultural studies to make a political difference: Is this due to the nature of the people who do cultural studies and their respective political and class stations, or the nature of the material? Are queer or feminist studies supposed to make the same difference?
6. How significant is it that, according to both articles, cultural and interdisciplinary studies are heavily driven by economic forces, be it the upperclass studying lower class pop culture, or the publisher looking for an audience to meet his financial ends (regardless of the intellectual value. see Germano p.332)?
7. thinking of mondays class aswell i was wondering about the possibility of defining anything as a discipline, including literature, and the usefulness of doing so (apart from the publishers finacial perspective).
8. i was also thinking that interdisciplinarity isn't really a "new" thing in that any traditional discipline has always been interdisciplinary in a sense e.g English literature covering anything from race issues to life in the middle ages and biology going from the evolution of plant life to neuroscience.