FIRST YEAR REFLECTIONS By Adam Rosenblatt On Mondays last winter, I raced my bike from a Law School class on International Jurisprudence, which ended at 2:30 PM, to the class I was co-teaching for undergraduates on comics and the "graphic novel," which began at 2:15 PM. The metaphorical weight of those fifteen minutes where I was literally supposed to be in two places at once, along with the drastic gear-switching (of my brain, not my bike) they required, often got me thinking about interdisciplinarity. I had come to Stanford after years of working at human rights organizations while self-publishing my comics on the side; I hoped that Modern Thought and Literature might provide a structure where my parallel interests, like art and international law, might actually intersect. Six months later, I still felt myself going in at least two directions at once. As I used my bike ride to shake the words "sovereignty" and "globalization" from my head and replace them with "closure" and "line quality," I wondered: was this interdisciplinarity, or just academic bilingualism? That Spring, I got my first real exposure to the work of more advanced students in my program. At a workshop where dissertation-writing students presented their research, I discovered how interdisciplinarity could mean more than joining two academic discourses. These students were incorporating unconventional and often activist research practicesÑteaching at a charter school, or performance artÑinto their dissertations. Methodology wasn't just the background to their work: as they evaluated existing methodologies and created new ones for themselves, it was the work. Then, at the MTL Spring Colloquium, I watched the second-year students present their qualifying papers on James Baldwin and human rights, eminent domain laws in India, and the literature and history of Asian immigrant labor at the U.S.-Mexico border. All of the papers were dazzling in their mixture of sources and topics, but also focused, convincing. Most comforting of all, I saw that none of the authors could have arrived where they did if they hadn't cast a wide net at the beginning, as I was doing. Now I am writing my own qualifying paper, my chance to reach into the grab-bag of what I've done since I got to StanfordÑclasses in Literature, Law, Communication, and Political ScienceÑand come out with something cogent. My early attempts, I now believe, were too focused on making the paper interdisciplinary, without focusing enough on what I really wanted to say about my chosen texts. So now I have returned to an essay I wrote on animated films by the Japanese directors Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro") and Isao Takahata ("Grave of the Fireflies"). As I've continued to write, the paper has delved into theories of the literary fantastic, animation and mimesis, food and the body, and the role of money-exchange in the narrative. In other words, I've arrived at interdisciplinarity through my readings of the films, rather than picking points on the map in advance and then trying to figure out how to get there. I don't think MTL is the only place where one can do interdisciplinary work, or that all MTL students wind up sharing the same definition of interdisciplinarity. In fact, the student body is in the midst of organizing a symposium to foster more dialogue on the subject. Which brings me to why I need MTL: as I work towards my own understanding of interdisciplinary work, I have access to a community of students who are all doing the same. The professors I work withÑfrom Law, Literature, Rhetoric, and practically anywhere else I might go lookingÑpush me as well, because they know that my work strives to be interdisciplinary by thoughtful design, not by accident or haphazard collage. As I'm discovering, that's a world of difference.
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