Cast aside for violating disciplinary boundaries

I hear you. I increasingly feel like an outsider in “my” fields; then DH becomes the field, but what’s that, anyway?

— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) November 1, 2017

I know the problem. I went over to the 'dark side', that is, the cognitive sciences, in the mid-1970s because, well, that seemed like the thing to do. What with emerging interest in structuralism and linguistics (e.g. Culler's Structuralist Poetics, 1975), the cognitive sciences would fit right in.

WRONG!

Derrida had begun deconstructing structuralism – and, yes, in this case the word is apt; Derrida (obviously enough) was not dealing in the pseudo-deconstruction that became popular a couple of decades later – and it stuck. Structuralism became post- and linguistics was forgotten. And I was out in the cold.

So welcome to the club.