Dear Reader,
Since its resurrection in the spring of 2023, The Common Room has shown a clear interdisciplinary impulse, even as it remained tethered to English Literature in name and style. The very notion of a “common” room brings to mind a certain contradiction: on the one hand, it affirms that the students who congregate there share something essential; on the other hand, it assumes that those students must come to recognize their commonalities in spite of their differences. This journal asks its readers and contributors to find common ground not in shared canonical texts or disciplinary boundaries, but in their shared critical attention: if research in the humanities can be said to have anything in common, it is that we all agree to point our attention to “the text.”
Of course, as noted on the About page of our website, “text” is a fickle word. Its parameters can be traced around the articles published in this issue: poetry and history, yes; but also movies, TV-shows, theatrical performances, video games, and books for children that do not contain a single word. It is only a matter of time before an analysis of a Tweet is published in The Common Room, or of dance choreography, or of some sort of digital media I cannot yet imagine in 2025.
To that end, attempting to categorize the contributions to this issue might sound futile, and to an extent, it was. Like disciplinary boundaries, journal categories are utterly arbitrary; but that does not make them useless. The order of the alphabet is also arbitrary, but we would not say that the letters shouldn’t occur in sequence. We have therefore categorized the articles in this issue using willfully arbitrary terms: “kid stuff,” “religion in visual media,” and “power in literary art.” On the one hand, these terms appear to signify something real; on the other hand, who the hell decides what is and is not a “religion”? Who decides what is and is not “appropriate” for “children”?
The future of the humanities is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and intertextual—our disciplinary boundaries and research categories are more permeable than ever, always eliciting what Stephen Moore has called “unregistered border crossings” between academic fields. These crossings may feel entirely recent—and to an extent they are—but, as Megan and Jude’s papers show, they are also ancient history. Perhaps the interdisciplinary really is a blast from the past, even as it proves to be the horizon of our academic future.
Sincerely,
The Editors
