Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Acutonomy

The story of twentieth-century literary criticism can be told as a story about methodological anxieties: anxieties fostered by the success of the sciences and enacted by critics who have tried to set the study of literary texts on a more scientific basis. At the macrostructural level were taxonomists: Northrop Frye attempted to locate literature's conceptual center and organize Ptolemaic satellite myths around it, inferring the existence of literature" from the possibility of criticism. Mean-while, Roman Jakobson sought the quintessence of "literariness" in the linguistic microstructure, seeking (and finding) unsuspected levels of complexity, first in Baudelaire and Shakespeare, then in lesser poets, then in advertising slogans. After the collapse of the structuralist project, calls for the scientization of literary study have increasingly come from outside the humanities, where, despairing of criticism's native efforts, cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists have begun to employ literary fiction as part of their ongoing project of explaining culture under a biologistic description. What motivates these attempts to scientize criticism, and what consequences would ensue were the goal achieved? " (Publisher)