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. —Jonathan Gottschall
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Way back in my checkered past, I taught at the Colorado School of Mines, an engineering school. I worked with scientists and engineers, team-teaching a projects-based writing course. It was very instructive to be the minority (gender of course, but also discipline). For instance, the humanities and social sciences were all smashed together into one department, while there were separate departments for Chemical Engineering, Geological Engineering, Astrophysics, and the like. I wasn’t exactly doing science, but working closely with scientists taught me a precise way of seeing quite different from my vaguer humanities compadres. That way of seeing didn’t stick, but what DID stick was the notion that not everyone sees the world as I do.
Oh, I was just being snarky…I’m all for boundary crossings and interdisciplinarity in this post-postmodern world of the 21st Century. I just did a search on Snow’s “The Two Cultures” to confirm my suspicion (I think I recall Terry Eagelton railing against him, but I could be wrong) that he was against constructivism. But I was happy to discover that he while he is interested in getting the Humanities past contstructivism, he’s also interested in getting Science beyond objectivity. So his view may very well be more balanced than I assumed. So: point withdrawn. Read “The Two Cultures”.
Correction: I wrote the writer’s last name as Gottschalk and it should have been Gottshall instead. I’m not quite sure how I made that error. Dennis: Here is an interesting new search engine that organizes information from wikipedia. It’s called Powerset and can be found at …http://www.powerset.com/
I agree with Dennis’ comment: “I would say that scientists should “do literature,” but that doesn’t mean I think they should do literature instead of science.” Do you think that a common ground between disciplines might be found in text semiotics and technical writing? Science-fiction clearly comes to mind as well; for instance, I’ve always enjoyed Dr. Arthur C. Clarke’s work because it elucidated scientific principles in narrative fashion without getting overly bogged down in jargon. Certainly, Dennis’ example of explorations of the “beauty myth” apply in psychoanalytic theory and criticism. Some fields of scientific inquiry seem to embrace qualitative research (so-called artistic) forms of inquiry such as ethnography among others.These were quite interesting observations made Gottschalk.
Literary studies has happily plundered the language of psychoanalytics, economics, for a while in the 80s and 90s “chaos theory,” and, more recently, ecology. Doesn’t it make sense that literary scholars be asked, instead, to experience the world that generated the terms they’ve appropriated?
The phrasing of Gottshall’s claim is deliberately provocative, annoyingly so… but applying computers to textual criticism (analysis of style, creation of concordances, etc.) testing the psychological reactions of volunteers who read literary works, and an exploration of how literary expressions of beauty accord to the “beauty myth” are all about exploring literature with new information that is gathered via methods developed in other disciplines.
And yes, I would say that scientists should “do literature,” but that doesn’t mean I think they should do literature instead of science.
I think Gottschall’s got it wrong: scientists should actually “do literature.” :-) When you flip the argument, it doesn’t stand. Behind all dualism lurks hierarchy. (And I learned that from literary studies).