A Science of Literature? Great Idea, So Long As We Get Actual Scientists Involved

Chris Mooney

Back in 1997, I was an unhealthily driven Yale undergraduate in pleated khakis. An English major--I wanted above all to become a writer--I was rapidly losing my faith. Not only did the theory-laden literary scholarship that I encountered seem little more than jargonish, impenetrable sound and fury, but the sciences appeared to have much more to offer. I followed in real time as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins engaged in ferociously exciting debates in places like The New York Review of Books. Here was a clarity, an urgency, and a series of battle cries that I, the grandson of a creationist-despising evolutionary biologist, could relate to.

Those were the days of the "Science Wars" in the academy, a clash between literary post-modernists ("po-mos") and scientists over whether the scientific process could lay claim to any truly objective means of describing reality. And thanks to people like Gould and Dawkins, I had slowly been turned. I was a mole within the humanities. That's not to say I'd stopped loving literature, but I felt I had to flee a ship that seemed without a rudder--and in the decade since then, it appears I'm hardly the only one.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 22, 2010 1:02 AM
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