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Hi Anne,

I put some of this into earlier posts to you and Paul that seem to have been eaten by the Serendip comment boxes, but here goes.

My position on rhetoric and interdisciplinarity falls along the lines of the "rhetoric of inquiry" group that published in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (ed. Nelson, Megill, McCloskey) (Wisconsin, 1987). I've blogged about this here, at

http://long18th.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/the-rhetoric-of-inquiry-in-the-long-eighteenth/

I'll also say that I don't feel that shared understandings are the precondition of storytelling or rhetoric, but the goal.

We offer stories in the classroom or the public sphere for the same reason we practice rhetoric, to produce a shared understanding that enables collective action or at least a "productive" discussion that feels like a collective advancement of our knowledge.

Though these shared understandings may be nothing more than shared frameworks or orientations, and though they may well be tacit, they are essential for students to feel that they are speaking to one another and advancing their own and each others' knowledge. And being able to recognize the conventions, warrants, and vocabulary specific to a particular kind of discussion is one of the crucial ways that students learn how to participate in that discussion, and feel that they are able to add their own understanding to that collective enterprise.

But students often need to have the tacit conventions of a particular body of knowledge (say, literary theory) explained and elaborated to them before they can recognize them as conventional and therefore available for their own independent use and elaboration.

As for metaphor, edgy or otherwise, I'd say that education is absolutely dependent on what Schon once called "generative metaphors," and that once again the goal is a provisional process of accommodation of knowledge to one's audience and its existing knowledge, moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, so that new insights can be generated. The rubbing together of disciplinary vocabularies helps in this process, but this does assume that there are important differences between the disciplines, and that these differences allow mutual criticism and refinement of each others' insights (e.g., the feminist critique of science, Foucault on penology, etc.). Interdisciplinarity is in my view a rhetorical perspective that cannot stand apart from the disciplines to critique them, but allows one discipline to critique and refine the insights of the other.

Finally, I spent a lot of time in my Cynic book talking about these issues in relation to Diogenes and his transformations in Western culture, but that's for another discussion.

Best,

DM

x-posted on Long 18th