Jane Austen’s novels are frequently constructed around mistaken interpretations. In “Emma” the eponymous heroine assumes Mr. Elton’s attentions signal a romantic interest in her friend Harriet, though he is actually intent on marrying Emma. She similarly misinterprets the behavior of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightly, and misses the true objects of their affections.
Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.
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.
Gottschall’s essay confronts
this problem head-on in an eloquent explication
of “quantifying the not easily quantifiable” that
precedes his report of a test of claims that
European fairy tales reflect arbitrary gender
norms of western patriarchal societies. He and
his student-researchers coded 1440 fairy tales
from around the world for explicit and implicit
assumptions about the sexual characteristics of
protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains,
males and females. Putting to rest (they
hope) the impressionistic underpinnings of the
gender wars, they found that in tales from societies
ranging from the most insular bands and
tribes to the most industrialized states, men and
women were sexually characterized pretty
much as they are in the West.
Will the evolutionary insights about the arts
provided in The Literary Animal raise the consciousness
of Menand, Smith, and colleagues
and finally bring the science wars to an overdue
end? Check back at the MLA’s annual convention
around 2010 for the latest developments.
this problem head-on in an eloquent explication
of “quantifying the not easily quantifiable” that
precedes his report of a test of claims that
European fairy tales reflect arbitrary gender
norms of western patriarchal societies. He and
his student-researchers coded 1440 fairy tales
from around the world for explicit and implicit
assumptions about the sexual characteristics of
protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains,
males and females. Putting to rest (they
hope) the impressionistic underpinnings of the
gender wars, they found that in tales from societies
ranging from the most insular bands and
tribes to the most industrialized states, men and
women were sexually characterized pretty
much as they are in the West.
Will the evolutionary insights about the arts
provided in The Literary Animal raise the consciousness
of Menand, Smith, and colleagues
and finally bring the science wars to an overdue
end? Check back at the MLA’s annual convention
around 2010 for the latest developments.
John Whitfield "Textual Selection," Nature (2006):
By borrowing the scientific method, says
Gottschall, literary scholars can work out what
a story is ‘really’ about, not in some ultimate,
metaphysical sense, but in the sense of whether
a wide range of people interpret a work in the
same way. Such an approach, he says, is needed
if literary scholarship is to create testable,
durable knowledge — and to prevent arguments
being settled solely by who deploys the
sharpest rhetoric and the best memory.
... Gottschall, though, wants to move beyond
literary value — or for that matter, traditional
literary criticism. Literary scholars may adopt
their theories from other branches of knowledge,
but they also push them outwards, using
their theoretical frameworks to analyse philosophy,
science, history and gender politics, for
example. Ultimately, the theories of human
nature that become widely held in a society
will influence how that society believes people
respond to their environments, and how they
should be treated. “Literary scholars aren’t
harmless,” Gottschall says. “When we get it
wrong it matters.” ■
