Is Literary Criticism An Art Or Science?

Joshua Rothman highlights the work of Franco Moretti – founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, dedicated to analyzing texts with computer software – who firmly believes it’s the latter:

The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” At the Literary Lab, for example, Moretti is involved in a project to map the relationships between characters in hundreds of plays, from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century. These maps—which look like spiderwebs, rather than org charts — can then be compared; in theory, the comparisons could reveal something about how character relationships have changed through time, or how they differ from genre to genre. Moretti believes that these types of analyses can highlight what he calls “the regularity of the literary field. Its patterns, its slowness.” They can show us the forest rather than the trees.

Moretti’s work has helped to make “computational criticism,” and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement. When, the week before last, Stanford announced that undergraduates would be able to enroll in “joint majors” combining computer science with either English or music, it was hard not to see it as a sign of Moretti’s influence.

Micah Mattix pushes back:

While Moretti has done some interesting work, the problem with many “scientific” approaches to literature is that too often they don’t begin with a question to be answered or a problem to be solved but are interested simply in proving the validity of a method for merely professional reasons. It’s the difference between a scientist who is fascinated with isotopes and energy conservation and who uses the scientific method to help answer his pressing questions, and one who is interested in the scientific method alone and who chooses to look at isotopes and energy conservation as a means of proving the validity of a method. The results are data dumps no one reads, answers to questions no one is asking or answers to questions that have already been answered.

Rachel Cordasco is skeptical as well, arguing that “books are NOT data, they’re books“:

[F]iguratively pouring mass quantities of books into a big computer and figuring out the average title length in the 19th century or the average number of words in 18th-century novels is not reading- and seems to belittle books, to me. Now, I know it sounds like I’m comparing apples and oranges, but still. We’re still talking about the worlds and words that change us for the better.

Now, I heard Moretti speak on the campus of UW-Madison several years ago, and I was charmed. This dude is just so darn charming. And smart. And suave. But as I looked at his charts and listened to his analysis, I felt chilled. His work was interesting, but his data told me nothing about the books themselves.

For me, distant reading, like close reading and all the other critical theories that offer us different ways in to books, is just another theory of reading. But what I’ve realized, after reaching the other side of academia and launching back into reading for the fun of it, is that only you can decide how you appreciate reading. Ultimately, though, reading is the act of running your eyes across the page and processing the words into images, sounds, feelings, and ideas. We talk to each other about books, we read passages out loud to one another. We lovingly arrange books on shelves or in piles. We download hundreds of them onto our devices. And we immerse ourselves in the stories they tell. So don’t talk to me about data, Franco, my dear. I simply don’t want to hear about it. I’m busy reading.

Previous Dish on the digital humanities here, here, and here.