May 21, 2008
Graphing Jane Austen
Jonathan Gottschall proposes embracing the scientific method in literary theory. As ridiculous as that may sound, he makes an interesting case in talking about Roland Barthes’ assertion that the author is dead (meaning, all interpretation is subjective, therefore, no text can be presumed to have a consistent interpretation). Gottschall speculates that much of what passes for literary theory is based on the force of the personality of the person who said it. In testing Barthes’ assertion, he set out to find how much variation really existed in reader’s perceptions of, in this case, 19th Century British novels.
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.
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3 Responses to “Graphing Jane Austen”
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This reminds me of that early scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams’ character has a student read a passage from their text where the author says one can graph the emotions of a poem, or something like that, to which, after a pause, Robin Williams says, “Excrement.”
Thanks for posting this, Deron. There are many interesting ideas here, but this is not the first time I have heard calls to bring literary study closer to the methods of science. I think, though, that the contemporary scholar’s urge to seek firmer ground has as much to do with professional frustration as it does with the literature being studied. People spend years training themselves–and only belatedly ask why am I doing this? What do I actually hope to achieve? So–the aura of science is injected as a bracer. There are already plenty of sociologists who examine the effects of literature upon populations, relating it to various theories generated in other fields. But it seems to me that literary scholars often confuse the value of a literary work with the value of their own study of it, in a way that is subconsciously parasitic: they insulate themselves from attacks on their own authority by transferring such attacks to “established” works. And as the number of readers declines, so does the authority that depends on readers. I suspect that an appeal to science might slightly bolster the confidence such scholars need to continue with what they are doing, but the best source of confidence comes from a more intense self-examination with respect to what is valued in literature. What has led to one’s desire to study it and talk about it? It’s surprising how many scholars one runs into who, when asked by some innocent student to account for why it is important to study literature, will simply trot out the old ridicule-infested answer: “Well if you have to ask, there’s obviously no answer that will satisfy you.”
Hmmm… If an inspirational Robin Williams character finds something execrable, it’s almost certainly on the right track.