Interdisciplinary Italian Teaching: The Challenge of Connection

by Clodagh Brook

Interdisciplinarity has been a driving agenda in Universities for some decades. We are encouraged to work in interdisciplinary ways, although these are most often only vaguely articulated. What does Interdisciplinarity mean for a small discipline like Italian, which has lost much of its disciplinary independence and identity through its absorption into Modern Language Departments or Schools? 

The study of a single country could include anything from the study of its literature and art, to the study of its car manufacturing, business practice and fashion industry. Italian Studies, however, is rooted in a philological model, dedicated primarily to the study of the literature of the peninsula. It is only in recent decades, especially with the belated arrival of Cultural Studies onto the agenda, that Italian Studies teaching has opened out. Some disciplines have been welcomed and quickly become canonical and mainstream (cinema, literature, history and politics primarily) while others remain marginal (linguistics, art history, music, new media, television and radio). In some Departments, literature – once the main raison d’être of Italian Studies – is close to disappearing.   

What is evident is that our discipline is constructed, not natural. It is rather arbitrary and prone to changes in taste. Why has cinema become mainstream in Italian Studies teaching, while painting and sculpture have almost disappeared? Why has music been almost entirely absent throughout the lifetime of the discipline? Why do we work so little with the sciences, with Cognitive Psychology, with Education and Statistics? These questions expose a deeper ontological one: What is 21^st-century Italian Studies? What could it, or should it, include? What does it exclude? 

As the object of teaching in our field has expanded, this has led to uncertainty about to the discipline’s identity. While contemporary Italian Studies appears to be founded on an increasingly expanded, if partial and shifting, notion of “Italian culture”, its boundaries are not clearly and definitely drawn. The teaching of Linguistics and Legal or Business Italian challenge the idea that contemporary Italian Studies is the study of “Italian Culture”. It suggests a very broad, open and ill-defined, “Study of Italy”. 

In other words, a rapid change in the discipline has led to its multidisciplinary, and fuzzy-edged expansion. This leads to two problems. The first is an unclear disciplinary identity, which is hard to articulate successfully and risks presenting a weak raison d’étre in an often hostile academic environment. The second is the widespread failure to negotiate interdisciplinarity along the way, thus missing a vital opportunity. Interdisciplinarity is not just the use of multiple disciplines, it is the connecting of those disciplines. It is the connection and integration of knowledge, methods, tools, concepts or theories that come from different disciplines. Most of what passes for interdisciplinarity actually fails to connect the disciplines it teaches. What this means in practice is that we leave it to our students to connect the disparate knowledge that they receive in our degrees. But, we rarely provide them with the tools to make there connections. The result is a broad, dynamic and interesting curriculum, but one in which students struggle to gain specialist skills and knowledge.

The question, then, is can the connection brought about by interdisciplinary practice help us strengthen the position of our increasingly fragmented, multidisciplinary Italian Studies? Can it enrich the kind of teaching we can provide for our students? 

I believe that our discipline uniquely positioned to answer these questions. In Italian, and indeed in Modern Languages more widely, integration and connectivity are in our DNA. We bring diverse cultures together; we have been doing multidisciplinary work, centred on a single country (or set of countries), for decades. What more could we do if we were to harness the interdisciplinary discourse of connectivity, so creating an interdisciplinary curriculum from the springboard of multidisciplinary one and providing a showcase to our universities?