Towards a model of teaching disciplinary boundaries – History with Literature and Literature with History: Theoretical implications

Abstract

In this article it is argued that students can gain a better understanding of both inter- and intra-disciplinary boundaries by inquiring into a single salient point where two disciplines may only partially intersect. Building on Marton's variation theory and Vygotsky's notion of articulation, a teaching model is presented and exemplified by disciplinary intersections regarding narration and narrativity in Literature and History. This is done specifically by investigating the theoretical implications of Shoshana Felman's notion of “key narratives” using William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!. The “key narrative” concept is adapted for the specific purpose of analyzing the practice of narratives in the disciplines Literature and History, respectively. It is suggested that Faulkner's novel seen as such a narrative explores pertinent questions concerning disciplinary boundaries for graduate and post-graduate students with a developed disciplinary identity in either of these disciplines.

Keywords

Disciplinary boundaries History key narratives Literature narrative student learning teaching

Introduction

Students are systematically exposed to theoretical divides within disciplines, what could be labeled intra-disciplinary variation. In Literature, close reading may be discussed in relation to deconstruction. In History, positivist and postmodern epistemologies, or micro and macro historical perspectives, might be contrasted. Sometimes, such matters are discussed in relation to general philosophy of science, other times they are framed solely within an intra-disciplinary context. By doing so, discipline-specific boundaries as well as general perspectives may be addressed. However, interdisciplinary variation is often experienced more or less ad hoc by students in a traditional setting, with neither systematic pedagogical forethought nor a pedagogical framework explicitly designed by faculty. Students majoring and minoring in different subjects may be exposed to differing perspectives more or less by chance and are often left to reflect on these differences on their own. It is also possible that a student will enter into post-graduate studies in a discipline after having spent substantial time and effort in another, with all its conflicting epistemologies and research traditions.

When multi-disciplinary approaches are needed to solve a particular problem, students often get the chance to reflect on these differences in collaboration with faculty more systematically in the same way researchers do. This usually takes the shape of borrowing theoretical frameworks, methodologies, or empirical results from other disciplines to benefit one's own research for instrumental reasons. A student writing a Master's Thesis in Contemporary history might be directed towards Political sciences or Sociology, and a student in Literature might be asked to relate his or her findings to some aspects of Linguistics or Psychology. In essence, instrumental relevance and similarities would be the basis for such exchanges rather than exploring contrasting disciplinary variations for their own sake. Adopted theoretical frameworks and other aspects are thus interpreted, reshaped, and used with the interpretative prerogative of one's own discipline (Wiklund, 2013). Similarly, interdisciplinary education in various forms would most commonly aim at exposing students to a multitude of alternative perspectives in order to deepen the understanding of a phenomenon or topic (Davies and Devlin, 2010). A step further in this direction is the so-called transdisciplinarity, where research and teaching address topics that are too complex to be encompassed by a single traditional academic discipline, such as sustainable development (Kaufman et al., 2003).

However, the variation in oddities, anomalies, irrelevancies, and differences that are left behind in these different crossovers – with all their pedagogical potential – would normally not be actively engaged by faculty or students. Our focus here, then, is not so much on interdisciplinarity as it is on the variation in disciplinary boundaries and what can be learned by exploring them. More specifically, building on Marton's (2007) variation theory, the hypothesis is that the deliberate interdisciplinary exchange of contrasting ideas between students from two different disciplines, detached from instrumental needs, could function as a means to deepen the understanding of the epistemological boundaries of one's own discipline. In this case, this is exemplified with how learning about History can inform students of Literature and how learning about Literature can inform students of History.

Furthermore, the model presented here is theoretically founded on the Vygotskian notion of articulation as key to learning (Bransford et al., 2000; Van Der Veer, 1998). The very act of explaining forces the student to create a more conscious, coherent, and reflected view of the topic at hand. Traditionally, such articulation would be made in a homogenous context together with peers and teachers within the same discipline. By extending this to include students of a different and even alien discipline, quite different types of “articulations” would be necessary, allowing for different types of explanations and microteaching parallel to the individual's own process of sense-making (Donnelly and Fitzmaurice, 2011). In the model presented here, this would be done through three basic steps:

Identification of a complex theoretical intersection that would not normally fit in a multi- or interdisciplinary inquiry, where one's own discipline would have the interpretative prerogative. The aim is to create an opportunity to experience variations in a partially shared field without the instrumental applications associated with specific research goals.

Choice of a concrete object of study that contains epistemological and ontological premises related to both disciplines.

Engagement of the students in iterative activities addressing both intra- and interdisciplinary perspectives related to epistemological and ontological premises. Students get to discuss a specific topic together with peers from the same discipline, followed by mixed small group discussions where the students get to articulate and explain their respective discipline's perspectives.

In the example presented in what follow, History and Literature are engaged by different theoretical perspectives on “narratives” and “narrativity.” Theoretical and philosophical assumptions, and how these assumptions relate to disciplinary boundaries, are in this case investigated through William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, a novel renowned for its probing of contrasting narratives, personal history, and truth.

Evidently, fictional literature serves quite different purposes in these two disciplines. In Literature, it is the main object of study and something that would be part of any definition of the academic discipline itself. In History, fiction such as the Iliad or Icelandic sagas may be used – quite cautiously – when non-fictional sources are lacking. In addition, historical fiction is sometimes used in History education to bring the past to life in a way ordinary textbooks sometimes fail to do even if this approach is much less common in higher education. In the model presented here, Faulkner's novel would mainly serve as a shared point of departure for a theoretical inquiry, with partly similar and partly differing learning agendas.

Theoretical intersection: perspectives on narratives, narration and narratology

Literature: narration as object – the example of narratology

In Literature as an academic discipline, narratives are mainly limited to the object of study. Narration is not often, explicitly, seen as a method of instruction or learning; neither are narrative research methods used in literature studies. Instead, students are exposed to theories of literature and narratives in the context of works of narrative fiction. Narratology is an instance of this; that is, the analysis of the narrative structure of texts. Representative works of this theory of literature are, for example, Todorov's (1977) The Poetics of Prose, Genette's (1980) Narrative Discourse, and Barthes's (1994) “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” The highly technical analyses of narratives within narratology border on linguistics with a strong focus on the instrumentality of language. Literature thus becomes a function of the structure of language and can be analyzed by breaking down the literary text into a formal system made up of definable parts that are generalizable to any narrative structure. Narration in this sense is, accordingly, what is studied and analyzed by the student of literature as the object of study.

The Literature major as a student of narratives

Post-graduate students can be expected to be well versed in different theories of literature. Even though they do not make use of narratology in their analyses of texts, their focus is still most often on the literary text as the object of study, as opposed to using an explicit narrative methodology when conducting their research. Even when the focus is “outside the text,” so to speak, as for example with sociological, historical, and biographical approaches to the literary work, the research methodology would rarely be called narrative method. Rather, the use of narrative as a method of doing research in literature is the default method, not requiring to be named as such. It is thus when not using a narrative method that it would be appropriate to qualify it, since it is deviating from the methodological norm. In Literature, research narrative method comes to be what could be called tacit knowledge,¹ and reflecting on and trying to make explicit this tacit knowledge can help students come to terms with the difficult task of understanding the disciplinary boundary between, for example, History and Literature.

History: narratives as object of study

By the time students majoring in History write their Master's thesis, they are experienced in using and studying various historical narratives empirically. Textual artifacts like letters or diaries are obvious narrative accounts of the past, as is the historical actor's storytelling in oral history. The students' education in historical methods most often includes the analysis of such narratives. Is this a first-hand account? Who was it written for, and why? In which context was it written? How does it relate to other sources? The empirical use of narratives is so ingrained in the subject of History that it is often not even described as a particular methodology, but is rather seen as a being part of the generic concept of historical method.

Sometimes, the label narrative history is used to describe a specific genre within the discipline where the text is structured chronologically, often giving voice to individual actors rather than structural phenomena. This may be a useful distinction when different genres and methodologies in History are discussed, but in a wider sense all History writing is about creating scholarly historical narratives of the past, regardless of form. (Cf. the etymology of history: Latin historia: “narrative of past events, account, tale, story.”) Thus, all senior History students are experienced consumers of professional historians' narratives through text books and lectures, in addition to being experienced in the empirical study of historical sources as narratives.

Narrative competence as knowing and learning History

For more than a century, educators, History theorists, and philosophers have tried to make sense of the nature of historical understanding, often in relation to the public's and students' perceived lack thereof. Making sense of the past from the present involves a spectrum of complex types of understanding – beyond isolated factual, theoretical, and methodological knowledge – always involving some degree of metacognitive reflection about self and other. The concept of historical mindedness can be seen as the understanding of history in the sense expected of professional historians, and that should be strived for in education. And, it has been argued that narrative competence can be seen as the synthesis of such historical mindedness (Rüsen, 1987; Wertsch, 1998). Official versions of history, myths and propaganda are alternative narratives of the past, but so are scholarly narratives as presented in text books and research. Narrative competence would be the individual's ability to create new historical narratives, i.e. new, coherent interpretations of the past, with the use of historical sources, methods, and theories. In that sense, the ability to create a new historical narrative becomes something more than just the ability to communicate knowledge; rather, it is a form of historical knowledge in itself.

Narrative competence and historical mindedness as intended learning outcomes of higher education lead to the notion of using students' own creation of narratives as a teaching and learning activity. The perhaps most obvious ways of utilizing this would be student graduate and post-graduate theses, where students are using first- and second-order concepts, or narrative tools, in creating a new, historically sound narrative.²

Narrative theories – a short overview

As is clear from these two examples, perspectives on narratives and narrativity can serve a variety of different functions within these two disciplines. It can be a research method, a mode of presenting research, it can be the object of research and study, and it can be a way of knowing, learning, and exploring. But what are the theoretical and philosophical grounds for these functions? When it comes to the specific disciplines Literature and History in relation to narrative, one obvious name that comes to mind is Ricoeur (1990) with his seminal work Time and Narrative, a work that explicitly deals with the complexities of narratives and narrativity in history and literature. Also worth mentioning is Bruner (1991) who, in his “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” has summed up many of the different perspectives one can take on the narrative function. When it comes to mapping narratives and narrative genres, the seminal work to consult is perhaps The Nature of Narrative, by Scholes and Kellogg (1966), which extends the concept of narrative beyond the novel to include a variety of narrative forms, from historical writing to myth, folktale, epic, romance, allegory, confession, and satire. Barthes (1994) has in his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” conducted a highly technical analysis of the structures of narratives. Lyotard (1984), in The Postmodern Condition, links narratives to knowledge, and stresses how knowledge is more than a question of truth. And finally, White (1980), in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” discusses the complex relation between fiction, reality, history, truth, and narrative.

Together these texts present examples of a wide range of theories that can be used as complementary literature in interdisciplinary teaching about narrative. However, in what follow, we have chosen to focus on Felman's (1987) concept ‘key narrative’ and her ideas on the relation between narratives, knowledge, truth, imagination, education, and psychoanalysis.³

Concrete object of study: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Key narratives and the implications of psychoanalysis

In both Literature and History texts are the main source from which knowledge and understanding derive. Both disciplines are concerned with interpreting the meaning of texts; history in order to understand the past, and literature in order to understand the text in itself, that is, the literary text as a work of art. This would be one type of difference that could serve as a starting point for interdisciplinary inquiry. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is a text that stages the complex connections between history, literature, narratives, and the past. This makes it possible to explore the significance of form and content, theory, and practice. Thus, for History and Literature as disciplines, Absalom, Absalom! can be seen as a key narrative, in Shoshana Felman's sense of the term. Faulkner's novel stages narrativity in such a way as to let History and Literature come together to explicate, or rather, implicate each other. What, then, is a key narrative, according to Felman? And what is her specific understanding of “implication”? In the introduction to her book Jacques Lacan and the Adventures of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, she writes concerning “implication”:

In practice (as a therapist or as a reader, a literary critic), one can use theories (as I am here trying to use Lacan and Freud) only as enabling metaphorical devices, not as extrapolated, preconceived items of knowledge. In much the same way that one cannot simply “apply” Freud's concepts to a patient, one cannot apply Freud (or Lacan) to a literary text. The practice of psychoanalysis (as well as the experience of a practical reading) is a process, not a set of doctrines. In the process, one can implicate the doctrines, one can perhaps imply them, not apply them. (Felman, 1987: 10–11)

What Felman says here is also the case, we would like to argue, with Literature and History education. It cannot be a question of applying Literature to History and History to Literature in order to achieve educational ends, but to see the implications of History for Literature and Literature for History in the process of analyzing them as disciplines, and in so doing achieve educational/pedagogical effects. We suggest that Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! can serve as a key narrative and thus accomplish these ends and effects. A key narrative, according to Felman, is a text in which narration turns into theory and in so doing producing the means by which other narratives can be analyzed. One of the most well-known key narratives in psychoanalysis is the story of Oedipus, of which Felman states:

In the constitution of the theory, however, the discovery that emerges out of the narration is itself referred back to a story that confirms it: the literary drama of the destiny of Oedipus, which, in becoming thus a reference or key narrative – the specimen story of psychoanalysis – situates the validating moment at which the psychoanalytic storytelling turns and returns upon itself, in the unprecedented Freudian narrative-discursive space in which narration becomes theory. (Felman, 1987: 101)

Faulkner's novel when read from the perspective of History and Literature turns into “theory,” that is, the narration becomes a narration that speaks of the possibility of narrative, of narrative truth, and about how to read the past by recreating it, about the imaginative performance of the past as History/Literature.⁴ Furthermore, we suggest that such interdisciplinary articulations would be equally beneficial, regardless of personal ontological and epistemological positioning and convictions. A student majoring in History that firmly rejects “the linguistic turn” – perhaps upholding what others might label a positivist view – would benefit equally from articulating commonalities, variation, and his or her own position together with others as suggested in this model.

In a similar vein, fiction and literature in general are often used as points of reference in philosophy of History. In the academic debates over what some call postmodernist epistemology, much of the divide centers around varying views on whether it is possible to gain knowledge about the actual past – or the relationships between the past, history, and the historian. Evans (1999), an outspoken representative of a more traditional view, describes the background to his best-selling book In Defense of History and why he felt it was much needed in higher education.

On the one hand there were tedious history primers which talked down to the student in patronising and didactic tones. On the other there was a rash of new books, many of them explicitly designed for teaching, which disputed the legitimacy of history altogether and mobilised postmodernist theory in the service of the argument that it was no different from fiction or poetry. (Evans, 1999)

Incidentally, some of the rhetorical energy that fuels these arguments comes from a quite different conflict, that between professional historians like Evans and Holocaust deniers, where the idea of at least partial access to the actual past through academic rigor and honesty is at the heart of a scholarly defensible history.⁵ The setting of Faulkner's novel, the American South and its history, obviously lends itself to similarly deeply held convictions that go beyond detached philosophical hair-splitting in class.

While the position mentioned above – where History would be “no different” from fiction or poetry – is arguably rare, a related position is upheld by, e.g., Munslow (2006) who sees it as “a form of literature.”

We have now lost the old, modernist sense of history as the fount of wisdom or teacher of moral or intellectual certainty. What this means is that any study of what history is cannot be other than located within its social and cultural context. History, as a form of literature, is like music, drama and poetry, a cultural practice. (Munslow, 2006: 17)

As different as such positions may seem to be, both would agree with the view that the historian can convey historical meaning by forming a narrative – and many historians would also agree that all such narratives have literary and esthetic qualities that in themselves also convey meaning. In White's (1984) description (himself a key postmodernist in Evan's view) of traditional narrative History, an opposing view is described:

A true narrative account, on this view, is not so much a product of the historian's poetic talents, as the narrative account of imaginary events is conceived to be, as a necessary result of a proper application of historical ‘method’. The form of the discourse, the narrative, adds nothing to the content of the representation, but is rather a simulacrum of the structure and processes of real events. And insofar as this representation resembles the events of which it is a representation, it can be taken as a true account. The story told in the narrative is a ‘mimesis’ of the story lived in some region of historical reality, and insofar as it is an accurate imitation it is to be considered a truthful account thereof. (White, 1984: 2–3)

These varying differences open up for a vast amount of complex issues to be discussed in intra- and interdisciplinary groups in relation to a shared key narrative. Is a well-written narrative merely more esthetically pleasing to the reader compared to one of lesser quality, in line with White's description above? Or does a well written scholarly historical narrative help bring the past “to life” emphatically, and thus may become part of scientific method in itself? If this is the case, how can these partly esthetic qualities be subject to (historical) critical analysis? Recent cognitive research suggests that readers get less observant and read less critically the more they are emotionally submerged in a text, so called “transportation” (Marsh et al., 2012). Is this merely a cognitive or psychological side effect that needs to be dealt with in teaching, or is it related to something fundamentally inherent in the discipline(s)? These and similar questions quite obviously lend themselves to in-depth discussions in the proposed intra- and interdisciplinary group discussions.

Absalom, Absalom! as key narrative

One of the major themes of Faulkner's novel is how the past can be understood and reconstructed. The two interlocutors Quentin Compson and Shreve (Quentin's Canadian roommate at Harvard) are in the novel trying to come to grips with Thomas Sutpen's family history and by extension the demise of the South after the civil war. Quentin is trying to explain the South to Shreve who as a Canadian has a limited knowledge of the South and its culture. In trying to explain the South, Quentin at the same time tries to understand his family history for himself. Shreve too is pulled into the story and they both become completely caught up in trying to untangle the different stories of Sutpen's family history and in so doing reveal something about the South and its downfall. In the course of this telling and retelling, the two young men also come to know more about themselves. One could also argue that they learn how to interpret and narrate history, at least this particular history, from the limited sources available to them. Moreover, they learn from each other's differences; and in consequence they learn another culture. Absalom, Absalom! is a complex novel, not least from a narrative perspective. It takes careful and close attention to the text to penetrate the novel's narrative structure. On a basic level, it consists of nine chapters of which the first chapter summarizes the other chapters. The eight remaining chapters can be seen as narrative perspectives of the first chapter.

Absalom, Absalom! ends with a question and answer than not only sum up the novel but could equally well be the reason for Quentin and Shreve's reconstruction of the Sutpen family history. It is Shreve who asks Quentin a final question: “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?” to which Quentin answers: “’I don't hate it’, Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I don't hate it’, he said. I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!” (Faulkner, 1936; 2012: 386). Quentin's response to Shreve's question hints at the central theme⁶ explored in the novel; in fact, the whole novel could be seen as a response to Shreve's question, each chapter and each narrative within the novel could be seen to strive toward an understanding so as to be able to respond to this question. How, then, is the novel as a key narrative to be read? How can Faulkner's text inform us about History and Literature? What possible educational and/or pedagogical consequences can it have?

As Hobson notes, speaking of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!:

The two novels – The Sound and the Fury coming at the beginning (1929) of Faulkner's greatest creative period, Absalom at the end (1936) of that period – are closely linked. Not only are both tragedies nearly on the Greek scale – concerning the decline and fall of a notable family – but each has as its center young Quentin Compson who, carrying the weight of family and region, commits suicide in the first novel but is brought back by Faulkner – at a point less than a year before his death – to serve as primary narrator for the latter. Either novel, then, could be seen as Faulkner's masterpiece; I finally choose Absalom, Absalom! not only because of the richness of its story (of Thomas Sutpen and his attempt to create a dynasty), its tragic dimension, its prose, and its narrative complexity (The Sound and the Fury shares these, after all) but also because of its keen historical sense. Absalom is the Faulkner novel that (along with Go Down, Moses) deals most centrally with what C. Vann Woodward called “the burden of southern history” – that is, the racial burden – and it is a work that paints, in many particulars, a realistic picture of antebellum life in the Deep South and explores the origins and the meaning of “aristocracy” in that region. In no other Faulkner novel, perhaps no American novel, are all elements of that critical triumvirate, race, class, and gender, explored so compellingly. For this reason, among others, historians and scholars in various disciplines, not just literary scholars, teach it in their undergraduate and graduate classes. (Hobson, 2003: 4)

Absalom, Absalom! can be read, within an interdisciplinary context, as a text that stages important questions and challenges that pertain not only to discipline specific knowledge but also to pedagogical issues related to teaching and learning. Quentin and Shreve are both students and learners (of history and of learning how to learn, understand, and gain knowledge). They try to reconstruct the events of Sutpen's family history, and in so doing they perform a narrative, that is, what they do with the sources becomes the narrative, a narrative of possibility, a family history that might or could have happened in the way they play it out. By extension, Quentin and Shreve's narrative also becomes a story of the South, of its history and culture.

What, then, may the novel tell us about truth, and narrative knowledge, since we cannot completely trust any of the narrators in it? Scholes and Kellogg (1966: 262–263) characterize this form of truth as “[t]he superiority of imaginative truth over empirical truth” speaking of Absalom, Absalom! and other modernist novels in which narration is used to problematize the possibility of an objective conception of reality. As Scholes and Kellogg observe:

The use of multiple narrators is another Conradian device which Faulkner adopted, with his own modifications, in Absalom, Absalom! Several points about this device should be noted. First, it was employed extensively by the Greek romancer Heliodorus and his European imitators (such as Mlle. de Scudéry).As narrators are multiplied, evidence become hearsay, empiricism becomes romance. The multiplication of narrators is characteristic of modern fictions which lean toward romance (as the fictions of Conrad, Faulkner, and Isak Dinesen clearly do). […] The tendency of modern writers to multiply narrators or to circumvent the restrictions of empirical eye-witness narration are signs of the decline of “realism” as an esthetic force in narrative.

The multiplication of narrators has another interesting effect. It tends to place the primary narrator in the position of histor,⁷ seeking to find out the truth from the versions he is told, as in the modern fictions of Conrad and Faulkner emphasis will not be on factual truth but on truth of imagination. William Faulkner himself once indicated that in Absalom, Absalom! we move from the least reliable narration, that of Rosa Coldfield, the eye-witness, to the most reliable, that of Shreve and Quentin, who imagine those events from which they have no empirical evidence.⁸ In Conrad and Faulkner as in Proust, the superiority of imaginative truth over empirical truth is maintained. (Scholes and Kellogg, 1966: 262–263)

Taken at face value, such a perspective would be hard to sell to most historians, since History is a profoundly empirical discipline, but would still work as a starting point for several shared questions: What is it that the historian does with his or her multiple and often conflicting sources, in the creation of a historical narrative? In what way does it differ from Scholes and Kellogg's notion of “imaginative truth”? What does it mean that this event has “actually” happened? What does Literature tell us about this? And how does this differ from the varying truth criteria that have to be met in History as an academic discipline?

If we are to read Absalom, Absalom! with the view of learning something about History and Literature as disciplines, we have to first come to an understanding about what kind of knowledge we are dealing with. Felman proposes to call the knowledge we are concerned with “textual knowledge”:

Textual knowledge – the very stuff the literature teacher is supposed to deal in – is knowledge of the functioning of language, of symbolic structures, of the signifier, knowledge at once derived from – and directed toward – interpretation. […] Analytic (textual) knowledge cannot be exchanged, it has to be used – and used in each case differently, according to the singularity of the case, according to the specificity of the text. […] Analysis thus has no use for ready-made interpretations, for knowledge given in advance. (Felman, 1987: 81)

In other words, Faulkner's novel will perhaps not tell us much about the history of the American South, but it will possibly tell the reader (and the learner in both Literature and History) something about narrativity, about sources (reliable and unreliable), about the intricacies of textual interpretation, etc.; that is, exactly the kind of activities Quentin and Shreve are involved in as characters in the novel. Moreover, these are arguably among the basic tools for conducting science in the humanities, more precisely to engage in hermeneutics.⁹ They try to come to an understanding of, first of all, the Sutpen family history; second, Quentin tries on his part to understand his place in southern history, how it affects him and shapes him, and also about his own family and himself; and third, Shreve tries to understand the south as a phenomenon, an alien culture, and also as an historical era.

By engaging in this, Quentin and Shreve also learn how to narrate and use narratives, interpret sources, and gain knowledge form the fragments of the past, exactly by actively being engaged in these activities. They learn textual knowledge and how to become histors. Moreover, they learn by moving away from scientific knowledge toward the kind of knowledge that springs from merging art and history, which is also true of the psychoanalytic project. Absalom, Absalom! in itself, then, as a text that talks about narrative truth and narrative knowledge, a text that concerns the possibility of gaining understanding from the fragmentary nature of time and history, and what is necessary in order to construct knowledge and understanding under these conditions, is a novel that stages the challenges of learning in History and Literature alike.

Concluding remarks: toward a model of teaching disciplinary boundaries

Coming to terms with disciplinary boundaries can be difficult, not only from a student's perspective, but also from a teaching perspective. Interdisciplinary as well as intra-disciplinary epistemological and ontological boundaries are often difficult to teach explicitly and an understanding of them are, for students, many times the outcome resulting from years studying and learning within a discipline. By momentarily bringing together two disciplines we propose that analyzing, reflecting and most importantly articulating the disciplinary boundaries within and between each discipline can help students in gaining a deeper understanding of the epistemological and ontological foundations of their own discipline. Inferring from Marton's variation theory, this potential is difficult to achieve solely in a traditional, homogenous, intra-disciplinary context.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Elias Schwieler has a PhD in English literature and works at the Department of Education at Stockholm University. His research interests include teaching and learning literature, philosophy of education, phenomenology, and deconstruction.

Stefan Ekecrantz has a PhD in History and works at the Department of Education at Stockholm University. His research interests include teaching and learning History, assessment in higher education, and normative values and emotions in higher education.

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