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Measure for Measure

Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science

By Jonathan Gottschall | May 11, 2008

IT'S NOT SUCH a good time to be a literary scholar.

For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education, a prime forum for cultural self-examination, and a favorite major for students seeking deeper understanding of the human experience.

But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.

The latest author to take the flagging pulse of the field is Yale's William Deresiewicz. Writing recently in The Nation, he described a discipline suffering "an epochal loss of confidence" and "losing its will to live." Deresiewicz's alarming conclusion: "The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying."

Not every literary scholar is so pessimistic, but most would agree that the field's vital signs are bad, and that major changes will be needed to set things right.

Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. 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. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

This proposal may distress many of my colleagues, who may worry that adopting scientific methods would reduce literary study to a branch of the sciences. But if we are wise, we can admit that the sciences are doing many things better than we are, and gain from studying their successes, without abandoning the things that make literature special.

The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away, and that would be a tragedy. Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape - one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions - from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

The study of literature is worth doing - and worth doing well. No one should be content to watch it fading gently into that good night.

I'm not the first to argue for a closer engagement of literary studies with science. For instance, in his famous 1959 essay on "The Two Cultures," the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented the scientific ignorance of "literary intellectuals," identifying it as a main reason for the yawning divide between the cultures of literature and science.

But I would go beyond Snow's suggestion that literary scholars should know more about science. Literary scholars should actually do science. "Literary science" may seem laughably, even pathetically, oxymoronic, but in fact it is already being done, with real results.

In some cases, it's possible to use scientific methods to question cherished tenets of modern literary theory. Consider the question of the "beauty myth": Most literary scholars believe that the huge emphasis our culture places on women's beauty is driven by a beauty myth, a suite of attitudes that maximizes female anxiety about appearance in order, ultimately, to maintain male dominance. It's easy to find evidence for this idea in our culture's poems, plays, and fairy tales: As one scholar after another has documented, Western literature is rife with sexist-seeming beauty imagery.

Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist. But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.

Or consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead. Roughly speaking, this statement means that authors have no power over their readers. When we read stories we do not so much yield to the author's creation as create it anew ourselves - manufacturing our own highly idiosyncratic meanings as we go along. This idea has radical implications: If it is true, there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean. But like so much else that passes for knowledge in contemporary literary studies, this assertion has its basis only in the swaggering authority of its asserter - in this case, Roland Barthes, one of the founding giants of poststructuralist literary theory.

Is this one of those squishy, unfalsifiable literary claims? No, it is also testable. Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Another type of investigation exploits the massive processing power of computers to generate new information and ideas about literary history. Great gains have been made in recent years with stylometric studies, the computerized crunching of sentences that can establish an author's stylistic fingerprint. As Brian Vickers explains in his book, "Shakespeare, Co-Author," stylometry has helped settle long, angry debates about whether or not Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with coauthors (the answer is that he very probably did). Similarly, Colin Martindale's book "The Clockwork Muse" used computer algorithms and experimental simulations to challenge conventional views of how literary traditions change over time. Instead of changing quickly in response to large-scale sociopolitical shifts, as has frequently been argued, Martindale found that literary traditions actually change gradually and predictably. From this Martindale provocatively argues that the principal driver of artistic change is not social, political, or religious upheaval, but the steady pressure on individual artists to "make it new."

Studies like these showcase the promise of applying a scientific approach: Relatively simple experiments can upend decades' worth of untethered theoretical speculation, exposing flawed assumptions and focusing scholars' attention on fresh and productive questions.

But to emerge from the present crisis, literary studies must borrow more from the sciences than the habit of experimentation. We must also study its theories, its evidentiary standards, and its optimistic philosophy of knowledge.

Contemporary literary theory, for instance, is deeply rooted in the "blank slate" theory of the mind - the idea that the human mind is overwhelmingly shaped by social and cultural influences, rather than by biology. But this theory has perished in the sciences, killed off by advances in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields. So most of the "big ideas" in contemporary literary studies have been flawed from their inception - they have been based, at least in part, on failed theories of human nature. Armed with a current understanding of the sciences of the mind, literary scholars could develop surer interpretations of individual works, answer larger questions, such as why literary plots vary within such narrow bounds, and even plumb the ultimate wellsprings of the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with story.

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. 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.

These problems with our theories and methods are compounded by problems of attitude. Over the last several decades literary studies has been deeply colored by postmodern skepticism about the possibility of developing new ideas or knowledge that are in any sense "truer" than what came before. It has also aggressively committed itself to the idea that scholarship can - and should - be a means to achieve political ends. Though well intentioned, this subordination of scholarship to political activism has distorted almost everything we've produced over the last several decades.

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 - a system that seems to be designed not to generate reliable and durable knowledge.

Setting things right will require an embrace not only of science's theories and methods but also of its ethos - its aspiration to disinterested inquiry and its measured optimism that the world can, in the end, be better understood.

The thought of moving literary studies closer to the model of the sciences may feel unsettling to scholars who have been trained to interpret the nuances of literature. Applying statistics to great literary works, for example, seems a bit like performing brain surgery with a cudgel: The tool is just not up to the delicacy of the operation.

But everything that is available in literary works for discussion, analysis, or awe-struck celebration is left intact by scientific analysis. A proper scientific process doesn't diminish, it adds. I'm not arguing that scientific tools can replace judgment, imagination, or good scholarship. I'm suggesting that combining these humanistic virtues with scientific tools would be like giving them growth hormones.

The changes I'm recommending would constitute a paradigm shift. They would require deep alterations in what literature departments teach and how students are trained. Of course, graduate students would still take the familiar courses on Shakespeare, Victorian novels, and 20th-century poetry, but they would also take courses covering scientific research methods, the basics of statistics and probability, and current thinking in the sciences of the mind.

As the field developed, it would build a methodological tool kit that retained an honored place for the old skills of close reading and careful reasoning, but also included new scientific tools of study design and statistical testing. Literary scholars would keep their long shelves of books and their habits of good scholarship, but would also avail themselves of sophisticated text-analysis software, the psychology lab, and collaboration with researchers from scientific fields.

Above all, these changes would require looking with fresh eyes on the landscape of academic disciplines, and noticing something surprising: The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it.

If we literary scholars can summon the courage and humility to do so, the potential benefits will reverberate far beyond our field. We can generate more reliable and durable knowledge about art and culture. We can reawaken a long-dormant spirit of intellectual adventure. We can help spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and "market share" they have lost to the sciences. And we can rejoin the oldest, and still the premier, quest of all the disciplines: to better understand human nature and its place in the universe.

It's a good time to be a literary scholar after all.

Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author of "The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer." This article is based on his next book, "Literature, Science, and a New Humanities," which will be published in October.