A Science of Literature?
Great Idea, So Long As We Get Actual Scientists Involved
SOURCE: SP
New proposals to revive literary scholarship with scientific methods could build a bridge between two long-separated academic worlds. The result could be a better understanding of both science and literature.
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Back in 1997, I was an unhealthily driven Yale undergraduate in pleated khakis. An English major—I wanted above all to become a writer—I was rapidly losing my faith. Not only did the theory-laden literary scholarship that I encountered seem little more than jargonish, impenetrable sound and fury, but the sciences appeared to have much more to offer. I followed in real time as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins engaged in ferociously exciting debates in places like The New York Review of Books. Here was a clarity, an urgency, and a series of battle cries that I, the grandson of a creationist-despising evolutionary biologist, could relate to.
Those were the days of the “Science Wars” in the academy, a clash between literary post-modernists (“po-mos”) and scientists over whether the scientific process could lay claim to any truly objective means of describing reality. And thanks to people like Gould and Dawkins, I had slowly been turned. I was a mole within the humanities. That’s not to say I’d stopped loving literature, but I felt I had to flee a ship that seemed without a rudder—and in the decade since then, it appears I’m hardly the only one.
Writing recently in The Nation, none other than a Yale English professor—William Deresiewicz—painfully bemoaned the “dying” state of literary studies. Colleges are hiring fewer and fewer English profs to teach fewer and fewer English students. Meanwhile, observes Deresiewicz, university priorities are “shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money.”
Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles.
In this atmosphere, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find another literary scholar, Washington and Jefferson College’s Jonathan Gottschall, unveiling a seemingly radical proposal: Remake literary studies with a firmer scientific foundation, so that the field can generate reproducible knowledge rather than running around in theoretical circles. In the process, perhaps the study of literature can share in one of the most exciting and appealing aspects of the sciences—the sense of optimism, progress, and accumulating knowledge as one attacks a truly conquerable problem.
Writing in the Boston Globe ideas section, Gottschall describes in detail what his science of literature would look like, something he can do because he and his colleagues have already performed some early experiments. They’ve crunched data comparing Western and non-Western literatures to determine if one is more sexist than the other (in the sense of constantly describing whether female characters are attractive). Result: There’s no difference. They’ve used statistical methods to determine whether reader reactions to the personages described in great texts, like the works of Jane Austen, are completely variable or confined within a fairly small set of responses. Result: The latter.
And then there’s one of the most impressive literary scientific techniques—“stylometrics,” which uses computers to pore over massive texts, compare their phraseology, and thereby determine whether or not they had the same author. We all have ticks in our prose, favorite phrases and flourishes, “stylistic fingerprints” that give us away and make it possible to put literary sleuthing on a firm empirical determination, so as to really determine the authorship of contested texts.
Ultimately, if literary study travels down the road proposed by Gottschall, it won’t be long before it intersects with the burgeoning field of cognitive science. After all, I suspect there is a core biological reality underlying our powerful responses to certain types of narratives. That’s not to say that literature or art can simply “reduce” to biology, because there’s a lot more going on. It is to say, however, that the course of study that Gottschall proposes might have helped a disillusioned young English major, like myself ten years ago, get excited again.
However, in the course of that past decade, as I’ve buried myself in science writing, I’ve learned that literary scholars aren’t the only ones who have their ivory tower foibles. Their chief weaknesses appear to be three: failing to produce really firm knowledge; often disguising left-wing politics as scholarship (something else Gottschall condemns); and writing in impenetrable jargon. The sciences, in contrast, do a very good job of producing progressive knowledge and weeding out biases—but they do not avoid the final weakness. Rather, science also fails to communicate broadly beyond a few specialized disciplines, and connects neither with English departments nor with the rest of society.
So while I find Gottschall’s proposal enticing, I think it must emphasize more strongly a critical component. The new science of literature needs the help of the sciences, the direct importing of statistical, computing, cognitive, and biological expertise to focus on literary mysteries and problems. After all, there’s a lot of data to crunch, and scientists could benefit greatly by having to study a very different kind of research object, e.g., the great text. Minds might open on both sides, and at long last we could realize, as Gottschall puts it, that “The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it.”
Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
Comments on this article
Chris,
This is an intriguing idea, but I suspect harder scientific inquiry will not, ultimately, help literature studies. Literature, at least good literature, is often highly nuanced. Even now, hundreds of years later, literary scholars are discovering new ideas in thing like the Illiad and Beowulf, not to mention the fascinating things we continue to hear about Shakespeare. I have to wonder if, and how, a more rigorous, scientific method of approach would really help this. Literature speaks to humans on many levels, and since most of them are the “soft” human traits like emotion, I am unconvinced they are quantifiable. And as scie3ntists know, any time we stray off quantification into qualification, we get accused of all sorts of nasty stuff.
Keep us posted.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:36 amLike we need another science. You do understand, don’t you, that there are other meaningful things for human beings to do than produce reproducible, objective results? If not, I’ve got startling news for you. There can be, indeed there already are, efforts to use the methods of sociology and other sciences to study literature; but it’s the merest category mistake, not to mention the most grotesque philistinism, to think that the point of literary study is to arrive at a series of true propositions. That’s botany, maybe. It isn’t criticism.
You sound like the guy in the old book who insisted that he was an expert in the theoretical side of natation and the fact that he could not, in fact, swim did not tell against his qualifications.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:45 pmInterestingly enough, I think the real benefit of an idea like this could be more on the side of science than of literature. I have to doubt the extent to which statistical analysis could contribute to a wider understanding of literary texts, as I believe the real value of these texts lies outside the domain of any theory at all. However, I wonder if science might not find stimulation, challenge, or inspiration in the experience of examining literature and potentially discovering new methods, patterns, connections, etc. If they exist in literature, I think it likely that they exist elsewhere in the by-products of civilization, and could potentially be applied to other fields, regardless of relation to the “soft” or “hard” inclinations of the mind. Furthermore, I think the idea touched on at the conclusion of the article is an important one. These fields exist as separate not because they inherently are, but because we have made them as such. The “barriers” to be broken on either side could yield significant results not for literature or science in particular, but for the nameless gap that lies between.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:00 pmChris,
I think you are a friggin’ genius :) What some of the commentators misunderstand, i think, is that I’m actually making a nuanced case (not so much in the article, but in the book to follow). I’m not saying that we should abandon all of the old ways. There is a fine, fat baby that should not be thrown out with the bathwater. I’m not saying that we can just buy shiny stats software, and leave off even reading Keats, much less analyzing/interpreting or doing historical research. But a large proportion of the questions lit scholars are asking allow, even demand, the application of scientific tools. The trick is applying the right sort of tools to the right sort of questions.
And people who claim that literary scholars aren’t interested in making fact claims–in accumulating durable knowledge–are simply out of touch with business in the field. In fact, literary scholars are regularly engaged in making some of the most rampant and sweeping fact claims about literature, science, race, gender, and just about everything else. The big difference between our claims and discourse in the sciences, is that we have almost nothing backing our stuff up except sheer magisterial assertion. The broader public, the broader intelligentsia, are basically onto this, which is one of the reasons why almost no one cares what literary scholars think about literature, science, race, gender, or just about anything else.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:40 amJonathan
Jonathan:
I’m glad to see you’re still willing to defend the baby!
As someone also trained in this field–both of my academic mentors were old Chicago people, so I’m probably abnormally amenable in some ways and abnormally hostile in others to this line of thinking.
But my challenge to folks who want to drag science into interpretation has always been: show me an original insight that this approach produces; show me that this approach will produce interesting and engaging literary criticism.
Marxism, say, provided interesting and new insights into many texts (though it could get pretty patience trying when used exclusively). The handicap you work under, I’d say, is that what we would call Darwinian thinking has been part of the zeitgeist for a long time already–before Darwin, even–and that elements of Darwinian thinking have already been incorporated into both criticism and the literature itself.
Essentially, Darwin borrowed a lot of ideas that were floating around in political economy, moral philosophy & social theory of urbanizing European society and applied them to the natural world. But those ideas were a large part of what literature was already about.
To take Darwin’s specific applications of some of these ideas and reapply them to literature seems like a needless diversion and an recipe for an approach to literature that will be rather crucially skewed.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:46 amThe author apparently is unaware of the significant influence literary studies has had on the rest of academia, especially in the study of how science is done. Science studies; sociology of knowledge; sociology of science; science, technology, and society: these fields have all benefited greatly from looking at scientific reports as literature. Scientific authors employ literary techniques of argumentation and persuasion, which is a fascinating phenomenon to study. You may believe that scientific facts and truth exist independent of human culture, but even in saying so, you depend on a particular human language and culture to deliver your perspective.
Why is it important to understand science rhetoric, among other literary realities of science? Well, take a look at a more recent article at scienceprogress.org: Manufacturing Uncertainty (http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/05/manufacturing-uncertainty/). How ideas are used, organized, communicated through language is quite important to the scientific enterprise. So, beginning back in the 1970s when science studies first took off, it has been science and the general public that have benefited from literary studies perspectives (not debunking, but, rather, adding to the richness of scientific endeavor, the human quality of it). If you talk to scientists themselves, rather than cheerleaders for science such as yourself Chris Mooney, you’ll likely find that scientists have a much more open-minded and nuanced view of scientific practice than you could imagine if you’re bent on defending a dualistic “we’re right, they’re wrong” view of science (versus the social sciences & humanities).
And, if you want to see scientific method and tools in action in the study of “literature,” broadly defined, why not look at the many years of work applied linguists and language teachers, among others, have done in the area of corpus studies, using computer software to mine and analyze texts of all types. It’s a firmly established and growing field of study, unlike the very minor and insignificant “stylistics” you refer to.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 pmBasically, the author of this article is out of touch with current academia, and I will hesitate from reading anything at this site from this author in the future. The last thing I need is another lecture on how “the left” lives in a bubble of bias and self-delusion. Had a look at what’s been going on in Washington D.C. the last 7 years? Corruption, war, death, pollution, lying, lying, lying, all with the help of the popular media. This site should not be used as an extension of right-wing media, already dominant outside of the Internet.
Recall the message of another article at this site: Manufacturing Uncertainty. That’s what Chris Mooney is up to, manufacturing uncertainty, although perhaps not for pernicious reasons. It could just be that Chris is lazy and needs to go back to school to see how things have really changed, rather than relying on the opinions of people working for right-wing think tanks.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:19 pmWill the real Chris Mooney please stand up!
How can your write this article after writing one from a fairly opposing perspective (”Yes, Virginia, There is a War on Science”) not long before that? Are you such a relativist, a wandering spirit, or a right-wing plant?
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:28 pmMooney states: “one of the most impressive literary scientific techniques—’stylometrics.’”
Rather than the minor and marginal ’stylometrics,’ why not mention a well-developed and respected field of study (within infomatics / information sciences) more interestingly related to your topic: scientometrics?
It analyzes scientists’ research in the form that is most common and influential in science: namely, scientific LITERATURE from research journals. This field, beginning with Eugene Garfield’s work from the 1960s in the US, has become central to the organizing and operating of scientific communities as defined through their literature, which is the most important way in which they’re defined (a point which your article conveniently ignores). This study of the influence (following patterns of communication) of scientific literature using sophisticated software and metrics is now a huge business (e.g., ISI Scientific) and is central to how academic researchers are promoted (through their publications). There, you have a scientific approach to scientific literature, which would be a much more appropriate, sane, and interesting topic to write on. Looking forward to it.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 pmDear Mr. Mooney,
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 pmI wish to send you some information in response to your article Sharing a volatile chemistry in The Australian, Apeil 30.
Please forward your email address.
Thanks,
Prof.Dr. Karl H. Wolf