I strongly recommend checking out this article:
The Next Big Thing In English: Knowing They Know That You Know
I loved reading about this foray into neuroscience via English, but I feel like it isn't as novel a concept as the author thinks (Ha! I'm trying to mind read!). Certainly this "cross pollination" of fields offers some new developments to inject some energy into English literature studies. Whether that energy is sorely needed as the article implies... well, you'd be hard-pressed to find a bigger English nut than this lady so just be glad this blog isn't about my indignation over that claim.
Ultimately, this hybridized field could definitely take off. But the way its framed in the Times' article seems a clever repackaging of the process of literary analysis. I can't really blame the author: searching for empirical evidence about what makes literature tick is much sexier than a subjective debate about tone and mood and allegory. It was a good introduction though and I want to read up more.
The best English professors I studied under were always careful to take a step back from literary criticism and look at the underlying factors that contribute to our pathos, or lack thereof, for the characters in our texts. Usually, these factors were framed as historical context - why was this writer compelled to tell this story, and why should readers at that point in time care? Why, for that matter, should we care 25 years later? How about four centuries later? An MRI can't tell us that.
The inherent subjectivity of that search for pathos is what makes fiction worth reading - every reader's experience is as unique and different as the human experience. And the human experience is what drives us to create that literature.
I think the quote from a Brandeis English professor sums it up nicely.
“It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction,” [Professor William] Flesch said, “but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”
And I don't think he means "Inherit the Wind."
Who... is today's blogger? Bleary-eyed, slightly hungover former English major who fancies herself a Sunday morning intellectual
What... is she eating? Tea and toast over the laptop, to get that nice crunchy typing sensation
Wear... ing pajamas and glasses that are smudged with butter from the toast
2 comments:
interesting...biology graduate student reading this in her pajamas with glasses smudged with butter as well...
Over my head
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