The Scientific Study of Literature?
This article may not be of much interest to most of you, though those of you interested in biblical scholarship might find it a welcome debate, but anyhow it got my imagination going.
Jonathan Gottschall, an American teacher of English, proposes that literary study is on the decline because it's left itself too open to unbridled speculation along postmodern lines. Its future lies in a better interaction with the sciences, and even scientific method (shock horror).
"If ideas like "the beauty myth" or "the death of the author" arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world's top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley's Frederick Crews points out, is that "our bogus experiments succeed every time." And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail."
Some of the preliminary applications of this idea that he discusses seem rather limited - almost embarrassing in fact - but still I can sort of see why I so quickly got sick of literary study: I think it was largely because I was allowed to be intellectually lazy. The same goes for philosophy in some ways. While I knew my scholarship was lazy (highly stimulating in a personal sense but not particularly rigorous), there was no particular incentive to make it otherwise, because personal engagement is what is valued in those fields. At least as an undergrad.
Postmodernism sucks. This makes me want to go back and do my degree again.
Or maybe the humanities are best left as an unfettered intellectual playground?
Jonathan Gottschall, an American teacher of English, proposes that literary study is on the decline because it's left itself too open to unbridled speculation along postmodern lines. Its future lies in a better interaction with the sciences, and even scientific method (shock horror).
"If ideas like "the beauty myth" or "the death of the author" arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world's top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley's Frederick Crews points out, is that "our bogus experiments succeed every time." And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail."
Some of the preliminary applications of this idea that he discusses seem rather limited - almost embarrassing in fact - but still I can sort of see why I so quickly got sick of literary study: I think it was largely because I was allowed to be intellectually lazy. The same goes for philosophy in some ways. While I knew my scholarship was lazy (highly stimulating in a personal sense but not particularly rigorous), there was no particular incentive to make it otherwise, because personal engagement is what is valued in those fields. At least as an undergrad.
Postmodernism sucks. This makes me want to go back and do my degree again.
Or maybe the humanities are best left as an unfettered intellectual playground?
posted by Kat | 5/20/2008 02:21:00 pm
5 Comments:
It's a problem, though, because the scientific method tends to be kinda reductionist, which is often a good way to destroy a work of literature. Stuff isn't so beautiful when it's just a bucket of verbs and nouns and tenses and cultural references.
I think literary criticism works when a bunch of people with different ideas are arguing – whether in the same room, or via papers or whatever. At least, that was my experience of biblical studies – it was most satisfying when I sought out sources that disagreed with me, and attempted to unify things.
(Archeological evidence obviously helps with biblical studies; but I guess taking the author and context into account is a good start. Not very pomo tho.)
I don't think he's talking about a return to formalism or literary semiotics (which, while perhaps not *completely* stupid and degrading to art, are certainly somewhat so), but more just asking for a bit of accountability among academics. Perhaps a bit of definition of exactly *what* literary critics are trying to do - a project which might be helped by seeing it as a branch of social science, a means of tracking the progress of human thought and experience.
The subjective appreciation of art, "what it means to me", is obviously central to its existence, but is perhaps not a particularly academic approach. You can't really argue about it, for one thing - you can only churn out more and more opinion pieces and try to say something different to everyone else. Such things are interesting and enriching to read, for sure, but are possibly more at home in a magazine or a book club than an academic journal.
Something more along the lines of surveying what a work of art means across cultures and different demographics, however, and the influence it's had/having, might be a better direction. Sounds sort of cold and aloof, I know, but I don't think it would be in practice. One could ask questions like *why* certain art appeals and endures, with reference to things like evolutionary psychology, anthropology etc.
I dunno, I'm not totally sold on this - just thought it was interesting. There certainly seems to be something 'broken' in current literary study - it seems very aimless and rather undisciplined.
I guess biblical studies (where most of my experience is) is not the best example; it's as much history, sociology and archeology as literary criticism, which makes it quite a different beast.
That said, that seems to be something like what you're suggesting – that we shouldn't be doing literary criticism so much as applying other scientific disciplines to literature. Could be legs to that.
That, ladies and gentlefuns, is why you should all study linguistics. It has the best of both worlds:
1. sciency bits where you get to be all analytical and say thing like 'this theory/result is not significant'
2. psychology/artsy bits where you get to describe what's happening, why it's happening in that group in particular, and how that will effect them or is relevant.
I do kinda miss the weird spieling of Mass Communication though. As long as you could say it well and quote someone published, it was right *sigh* if only work was like that...
I have to say, Kat, I love your idea of those branches of the humanities as "surveying what a work of art means across cultures and different demographics". I loved studying Middle English Lit for precisely that reason (and cos dead dialects are fun!) - it gave me a huge insight into how people lived, understood the world and wrote 500 years ago in Medieval Britain. Those kinds of disciplines give people a much broader appreciation of the human mind, collective experiences and cultures. Or maybe that's just cos I trained as a linguist and that's how we see the world :P
Heh, the literary studies/biblical studies comparison might be a good one...
Just thinking of the difference between focussing on the subjective experience of God/scripture, and actually getting into some solid theology... both are very important and each enhances your understanding and experience of the other. I can see how the same would be true of literature if you're trying to study it rather than just dabble for pleasure.
Cool.
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