Chris Mooney is a freelance writer and the author of two books, 
My latest Science Progress column just went up--it's a reaction to this intriguing proposal, by scholar Jonathan Gottschall, to remake the ailing field of literary studies with a scientific foundation. An excerpt:
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.
You can read the full column here.
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Comments
"Stylometrics" goes back to the 1960s, when Mosteller and Wallace investigated the authorship of The Federalist Papers. It's good solid statistics.
There are aspects of literature that can be studied statistically, but to replace the whole area of literary theory by statistics sounds like a good way to kill off the subject. It really reduces the set of questions that can be answered. And most of the ones it excludes are probably the ones humanists are most interested in.
Posted by: Bob O'H | May 21, 2008 12:01 PM
stylometrics is a new term ... thanks :-)
Posted by: Jill | May 21, 2008 8:28 PM
Hmmm. I'm more keen on the idea of science interacting with philosophy and history. PZ Myer's was discussing this in his recent Bloggingheads:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11305?in=00:08:00&out=00:12:54
I had the same reaction to 90's literary theory that you did. But my way of dealing with it was studying lit in the context of historical periods...
Posted by: Jon Winsor | May 24, 2008 3:41 PM