The Impossible Research Archive

[...]odds are that it will actually make it worse, festooning it with superfluous footnotes and inorganic digressions. In a recent column in Public Books, Justin Steinberg-a prolific Dante scholar and editor of the prestigious journal Dante Studies-argues that excessive disciplinary specialisation is actually standing in the way of learning genuinely new things about the great Florentine poet. Lamenting that it has become 'increasingly rare to find scholarly examinations of Dante's texts by non-specialists', he concedes that he can't blame those outside the guild for being wary of attempting to publish on Dante: 'If today I were to send the writings of Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, or Ernst Kantorowicz out for double -blind peer review, they would be rejected for failing to engage adequately with the secondary criticism'.1 This attitude shows why a generation of continual calls for more interdisciplinary work have gone largely unheeded, and truly interdisciplinary work largely unrewarded-the gatekeepers within each discipline demand that the interdisciplinary scholar master two impossible bodies of literature instead of just one. [...]I believe that interpretation of the Qur'an's Joseph story to be 'correct' largely because it