Investigator Rose Fox alerts us to a breakthrough: A professor of English literature is transforming his field into a new branch of science. Investigator Fox remarks, “My favorite is the bit where he describes a rigorous experiment using tools borrowed from that hardest of hard sciences, psychology.”
Professor Jonathan Gottschall of Washington & Jefferson College announced his achievement in a May 11, 2008 essay in the Boston Globe. Here are brief highlights:
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….
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….
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…. Our conclusion: rumors of the author’s demise have been greatly exaggerated….
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.