Introduction: The Transdisciplinary Imperative

This special issue introduction outlines the risks and opportunities for literary scholars as they negotiate the transdisciplinary imperative currently facing the discipline. Since its entry into the modern academy, literary studies has been punctuated by numerous ‘turns’ that suggest an interdisciplinary bearing that has often gone unrecognised. The current prediction of a transdisciplinary future for the discipline is addressed in terms of this overlooked potential and as an imperative bearing down not just on literary studies or the humanities but all academic disciplines, as disruptions in health care, the attention economy, and AI illustrate. A brief defence of the hermeneutic idea of concepts as frameworks to inhabit rather than as tools to apply to a chosen problem is offered in the context of the professionalisation of knowledge in the modern academy that has long favoured the information sciences over the interpretive sciences. The interdisciplinary value of literary training and aesthetic education is advanced across the issue in the fields of medical humanities, positive humanities, attention studies, and in projects like sustainability discourse and decolonising the curriculum.