A Better Understanding of Both Science and Literature

Chris Mooney has an excellent article on Science Progress entitled, A Science of Literature? It's about reviving literary scholarship with scientific methods, like stylometrics. Very interesting.

Here's a relevant quote from Mooney's article. Follow the links within the links.

"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.”

"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."

Read more.

The general premise makes sense to me. When statistical and literary interpretations are combined (or integrated without one being completely reduced to the other) a different or more-embracing perspective of "reality" is likely to emerge.