Science is limited by what scientists are capable of measuring. Our understanding of reality can only reach as far as our best experiments. If you were to ask any physicist, they’d tell you that physics stops at what we can measure: beyond that, we reach metaphysics, the land of unfounded speculation about why physics works. It is literally impossible to ever test a hypothesis in metaphysics because, by definition, no experiment can enter the world of metaphysics.<\/p>\n
Someone go tell that to an English professor. Sounds like metaphysics to me.<\/p>\n I may be corrupted by my science education, but seriously, I have several problems with literary analysis.<\/p>\n The first is, of course, simple: what if the author just wanted to tell a #($*ing story? The central axiom of literary analysis seems to be “it has a meaning — just find it!” Well, maybe it doesn’t. I know I’ve written pieces of poetry and then gone back and found all sorts of literary devices pointing at some central meaning, and I only found the meaning after<\/em> I had written the stupid thing. It’s pretty easy to do.<\/p>\n The second problem is that literary analysis smells like metaphysics to me. Rather than looking at the testable — what happened in the book — we’re looking at the unverifiable: what the author was thinking when he wrote the book. We, of course, have absolutely no way of knowing (unless the government’s been doing things I haven’t heard about yet), but that never stops anybody. The literary analysis just keeps going, regardless of the fact that the author is probably dead already.<\/p>\n A scientist must always prove that his experimental findings are outside of the possibilities of random chance. He or she might run the experiment several times and then do a statistical test to see if the results could just be a fluke. Only when results are almost certainly not a random fluke are they reported.<\/p>\n Not so in literary analysis. Spotted an interesting use of parallelism and diction in the second paragraph? The author’s probably commenting on the unequal social status of women in the time period. Notice repetition of a few key words? They’re probably being emphasized to bring the emotional point home and highlight the cruelty of society. Never mind the fact that the author might just have decided those words sounded kinda cool there.<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe field of English literature, as far as I can make out, has a lot to do with the “deeper meaning” of literary works. Read a book carefully, look at the techniques the author uses as part of his or her literary style, and you can make out the true purpose of the book. (Update:<\/strong> Perhaps I should make it clear that I am attacking is the “let’s find what the author intended” sort of analysis. Just analyzing the text, or seeing how the reader responds to it, makes sense. But you can’t extend that to find out what the author’s subtle purpose was.)<\/p>\n