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ivyficA very interesting article on literary criticism. The author, Jonathon Gottschall, an English professor, points out, "While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves." He is not wrong.
Gottschall shows that, if you're trying to understand human nature, human cultures, psychology, the history and development of trends through literature, you not only can use scientific methods, you have to. He talks about two ideas, "the beauty myth," that Western societies' unique focus on the attractiveness of women in its literature is the source of its sexism, and "the death of the author," that every reader experiences a different book, that have been disproven:
Very interesting. I was not an English major, but do spend all my time with them, and I agree with pretty much everything this guy is saying. If all academics are doing is talking to each other, agreeing on theories based on the charisma of the espouser, and not basing their conclusions on reality, no wonder I've always felt like literary criticism is complete BS.
Gottschall shows that, if you're trying to understand human nature, human cultures, psychology, the history and development of trends through literature, you not only can use scientific methods, you have to. He talks about two ideas, "the beauty myth," that Western societies' unique focus on the attractiveness of women in its literature is the source of its sexism, and "the death of the author," that every reader experiences a different book, that have been disproven:
But 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.
…
So bring together obsolete theory, inadequate methods, unbridled ideological bias, and a spirit of surrender to "unknowability," and you have the modern situation in academic literary study.
Very interesting. I was not an English major, but do spend all my time with them, and I agree with pretty much everything this guy is saying. If all academics are doing is talking to each other, agreeing on theories based on the charisma of the espouser, and not basing their conclusions on reality, no wonder I've always felt like literary criticism is complete BS.