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Литература как предмет научного исследования Literature as a subject of a scientific study
Клюева Ксения Викторовна
Магистрант 2 курса Факультет Свободных искусств и наук Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет
Россия, Санкт-Петербург e-mail: ksenia. kliueva@gmail. com
Kseniia Kliueva
Master Student 2 term Faculty of Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences Saint Petersburg State University Russia, Saint Petersburg e-mail: ksenia. kliueva@gmail. com
Аннотация.
Будучи характерным представителем гуманитарных дисциплин, базирующихся на интерпретативной эпистемологической парадигме, подразумевающей субъективный характер знания, литературоведение сегодня столкнулось с серьезным кризисом доверия. Попытки преодолеть этот кризис привели к возникновению интереса к применению методов естественных и точных наук для изучения литературных текстов. Наиболее многообещающим из таких методов на сегодняшний день считается эксперимент. Однако использование экспериментального метода в изучении литературных текстов также не лишено целого ряда существенных недостатков, ставящих под сомнения его релевантность. В настоящей работе я анализирую плюсы и минусы использования научных методов в литературоведении и пытаюсь ответить на ключевой вопрос: может ли литература вообще быть предметом научного исследования?
Annotation.
Being originally a part of the humanities, which are based on interpretive epistemological paradigm implying subjective nature of knowledge, literary studies nowadays faced a serious crisis of credibility. The attempts to overcome this crisis led to the interest in applying methods of natural and exact sciences to investigation of literary texts. Most promising among such methods seems to be experiment. However, even it, when being applied to literary studies, shows some crucial disadvantages that call into question its relevance. In this paper I analyze pros and cons of using scientific methods in studying literature and try to answer the question of whether literature can be a subject of a scientific study.
Ключевые слова: философия науки, методология науки, теория литературы, экспериментальные исследования литературы.
Key words: philosophy of science, methodology, literary theory, experimental studies of literature.
Science and Humanities
When someone says the word "science" I suppose most people think about physics, biology, chemistry or at least math. The reason for such a strict pull of associations is that in English the word "science" is traditionally associated with natural or exact sciences only. Therefore, it is hardly possible to talk about, for example, science of art, literature and so on [van Peer, Hukemulder, Zinger 2012: 31], and for that kind of studies the word "humanities" is traditionally used.
Differentiation between sciences and humanities has long roots. In his paper about theories of literature Willie van Peer traces this distinction back to the concept of dualism. In this context it implies that our reality is divided into the "natural" world, which is studied by "natural" sciences, and "non-natural" world, which is a subject of study of humanities and social sciences. From van Peer's point of view, the concept of dualism in its turn is based on the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey. Relying on Descartes distinction between the natural world and the thinking world, Dilthey separates understanding, which is the main purpose of humanities, and explaining, which is traditionally associated with natural sciences [van Peer 2014: 114].
These two separate processes underlying sciences and humanities, obviously, result in the type of methods used in these fields. Humanities is traditionally associated with qualitative methods, while natural sciences - with quantitative ones. According to Howe, quantitative and qualitative methods are incompatible with one another but not on the level of methods themselves but on the level of epistemological paradigms, on which they are based: positivism and interpretivism respectively [Howe 2009: 768]. Positivism implies that "there are facts that can be pr oven, reality is the same for each person <...>, and observation and measurement tell us what that reality is" [Ryan 2018: 15]. It "confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations" [Britannica 2021]. Interpretivis m in its turn, being an opposition to positivism "argues that truth and knowledge are subjective, as well as culturally and historically situated, based on people's experiences and their understanding of them" [Ryan 2018: 17]. In this case the very possibi lity of applying scientific (read — positivist) methods to humanities may cause fear, because it actually attacks the basic idea of humanities, reducing the diversity of interpretations to one universal truth.
However, despite such a strong epistemological difference between natural sciences and humanities, nowadays more and more scholars in the humanities are getting interested in using scientific methods in their research. Literature studies is not an exception. In the next section of this paper I will show how the situation in the field led to this interest.
Literary studies: current state of affairs and the on-going crisis
According to van Peer, during last 25 years we have been witnessing an on-going crisis in literary studies. It is reflected in the reduction of investments in humanitarian research as well as the numbers of majors in the humanities (especially literature), which actually leads to the reduction of the humanitarian chairs at the universities worldwide [van Peer 2019: 1-2]. His rather pessimistic (or actually realistic) view is based to some extent on considerations of Jonathan Gottschall, who claims that literary studies are not only becoming less and less important in higher education but also lose their cultural prestige: "People still take great satisfaction in reading; they just don't need academics mediating between them and their texts of choice" [Gottschall 2008: 1-2].
The only way to overcome that crisis in literary studies, from van Peer's point of view, lies in a search for a new paradigm. However, as he writes, despite the fact that such an attempt was actually made numerous times, leading to the emergence of many new approaches in literary theory since 1980s (from New Historicism to Feminism and Queer Theory), literary studies are still in a state of stagnation. All of that "new" theories, which were supposed to provide a paradigm shift, created only an illusion of changes [van Peer 2019: 2]. Paradigm shift, as it is described by Kuhn, "alters the fundamental concepts underlying research and inspires new standards of evidence, new research techniques, and new pathways of theory and experiment that are radically incommensurate with the old ones" [Britannica 2021]. However, in the case of all these new theories we are dealing not with superseding but only with replacing one theory with another without any progress. There is nothing new in methods or basic concepts of that approaches except general framing [van Peer 2019: 2].
Generally, the main reason of loss of status of literary studies in the modern society is closely linked to a problem that relates to most of the existing literary theories — the lack of any empirical evidence supporting their claims and rejection of a possibility of looking for such evidence. As I have mentioned above, this "intolerance" to empirical research goes back to the basic idea of the whole field, which relies on the claim of subjective nature of the truth.
At the same time, despite this idea, we cannot deny that what literary studies really do is that they are trying to explain to readers how to read and to understand texts in a, so to say, proper way. And in that case, they are actually trying to pretend to some kind of the universal truth themselves, meaning they are trying to look like science. However, if something pretends to be a science it should meet certain requirements — at least basic ideas of verification and falsifiability formulated by Karl Popper. First one implies that any theory to become a scientific one should be verified
empirically and the second one implies that the theory should be able to be rejected through this verification [Popper 2002]. Hardly any of the existing literary theory meets these requirements.
Referring to Roger Penrose's typology of theories in physics in his paper about theories in literature, van Peer claims that most of literary theories may be considered as tentative ones. In comparison with superb and useful theories, tentative theories do "not possess much empirical support of any significance" but "it does not make them useless or uninteresting" [van Peer 2014: 116]. At the same time, the fact that literary theories reject any attempt to be empirically tested makes them look as misguided, even speculative ones [van Peer 2014:118]. As an example of such theory he cites the feminist literary theory. A lot of researchers working within this framework make claims about special character of female authors' language, the general one being that it is totally different from male authors' language. But the problem here, as van Peer indicates it, is that these claims are based totally on the subjective views of their authors. However, it is more than possible to test their hypotheses, for example, with the use of computer analysis of corpora or even with an experiment that will show whether real readers perceive text written by male and female authors differently or not [van Peer 2014: 118-119]. But nothing of it had been done (at least at the time van Peer was writing his article), so their claims are far from being reliable from the point of view of science per se.
So, what should literary theorists do to make their theories more reliable and to overcome the ongoing crisis? From van Peer point of view, in such a situation the only way for literary studies to do that is to borrow methods from natural and exact sciences [van Peer 2019: 2]. Such methods may include, for example, computer analysis of corpora, which has already been mentioned above, or style (known as stylometry) [Hoover 2008], or even network analysis of connections between literary heroes in the text [Fischer, Skorinkin 2021]. However, despite the fact that these statistical methods make a notable contribution to the reliability of literary theories, they can be seen only as new tools for the analysis that in some way made be done without them. On the other hand, experiment may be seen as a truly new method in literary studies. In the next part I will talk about it in more detail.
Experimental method — a way out of crisis?
The greatest advantage of using of the experimental method in literary studies is that it allows to test previously formulated hypotheses about the effect that structure, style, or language of a literary work have on readers' perception and thus to understand how real readers perceive literature in general. This shift from the text itself to the readers' perception and from pure claiming to testing hypothesis is a key principle that may result in a paradigm shift in case of literary studies.
Experimental studies of literature started in 1980s with the works of Willie van Peer, who was mentioned earlier several times. In a series of experiments described in his book "Stylistics and Psychology: Investigation of Foregrounding" [van Peer 1986] van Peer aimed to test how poetic devices affect readers perception of a literary text. The experiments were based on the theory of foregrounding, according to which writers, using the capability of our perception to distinguish figure from the background, enrich their works with special poetic devices (van Peer calls them foregrounding devices) that deviate from the rest of the text and thus attract our attention and direct perceptional processes. Starting with the analysis of the key points of the theory itself (which actually was proposed and elaborated by formalists and structuralists in the first half of 20th century) he then formulates a series of experimental hypotheses to be tested. He claims that poetic devices should be remembered better and should be evaluated as more striking, more important for text interpretation and as possessing more discussion value. During the experiments participants had to read several texts and to complete several tasks. For example, readers were asked to underline fragments of the text that, as they think, are the most important, striking etc., to range different text fragments according to their discussion value. They were also presented with modified versions of the texts where some of the words were missing, and readers were asked to fill in
these gaps. Subsequent statistical analysis of the data confirmed most of the hypotheses, except the one about better memorability of foregrounded elements.
Since the pioneering work of van Peer was published, experimental investigations of literature have become a huge interdisciplinary field. Today it includes numerous behavioral experiments as well as experiments conducted with the use of eye-tracking methodology or with such methods as fMRI and EEG, which allow for registration and measuring of brain activity (for more detail see [Falikman 2017, Jacobs 2015]).
Six main directions, in which most of experimental studies of literature are conducted nowadays, may be outlined, including:
1. Emotional and affective responses of readers: it was shown that poetic (or foregrounded) elements of the text cause higher emotional reactions from readers than ordinary ones, as well as literary texts with greater number of foregrounded elements compared to those with smaller amount of such elements [Miall, Kuiken 1994; Hakemulder 2004; Sopcak 2007; Koopman 2016, Wassiliwizky et all. 2017].
2. Reader's comprehension of the literary text: it was shown that readers usually evaluate foregrounding devices as more important for the understanding of the text [Miall, Kuiken 1994; Hanauer 1998(a), Salgaro 2016; Koopman 2016]
3. Processing of literary text: it was shown that literary texts are read more slowly in comparison with nonliterary ones [Zwaan 1991, 1994; Miall, Kuiken 1994; Salgaro 2016; van den Hoven et al. 2016]
4. Memorability of literary texts: it was shown that literary texts in general and foregrounded elements in particular are remembered better [Hanauer 1998(a), Hanauer 1998(b), Tillmann, Dowling 2007]
5. Effects of literary conventions on perception of the text: it was shown that if reader thinks that he/she is reading a literary text it will be perceived differently compared with a situation when the reader thinks that he/she is reading a non-literary one [Zwaan 1991, 1994; Hanauer 1998(a), Hanauer 1998(b)]
6. Effect of reader's expertise on perception of the text: it was shown that more literary experienced readers (e.g., philology students) perceive literary text differently compared with readers with less expertise [Hoffstaedter 1987, Hanauer 1996]
Such a diversity in the experimental research of literary text perception shows that this method has taken root well in the studies of literature. However, despite its huge contribution in making literary theories more reliable, it also has some significant disadvantages that make it impossible to claim that it should replace other nonempirical methods of literary studies. One of these disadvantages, for example, lies in a fact that some experiments in this field are conducted just for the experiment itself. It is a huge problem, for example, for several studies that use fMRI technique — some of them just show us what areas of the brain are active when a person is reading literary text, and nothing else. Another big problem is that literary texts are undergoing huge changes for the purposes of experiment, which makes them far more different from what was originally created by the author. In that case it turns out that the object of a study is not the literary text itself but an experimental textoid [Hall 2008: 21] that has little in common with literature at all. Moreover, it should be noted that existing experimental studies of literature have little to add to our understanding of literary text meaning. They practically do not deal with that aspect of literary studies that is crucial for the whole field — the interpretation.
All of these disadvantages raise several questions that cannot be ignored by scholars who are trying to investigate literature experimentally. First of all, when we focus mostly on reader's perception are we still studying literature or it is something different? Maybe it is human perception we are dealing with, and in this case we shift from doing literary studies to doing cognitive studies, where literary texts become only material for us? Finally, another question that should be raised here is whether we can really trust the results of the experiments, since the original text is undergoing crucial changes when its experimental version is made, and is doubtful that what is left may be considered as a real literary text?
Conclusion
As I have shown, being originally a part of the humanities, which are based on interpretive epistemological paradigm implying subjective nature of knowledge, literary studies faced a serious crisis of credibility. The attempts to overcome this crisis led to the interest in applying methods of natural and exact sciences to investigation of literary texts. Among such methods are computer analysis of corpora, computer analysis of style (known as stylometry), network analysis, and experiment. Nowadays the last one is becoming more and more popular mostly because it helps to test claims made by literary scholars about reader's perception of the text that could not be tested in any other way. However, even such a reliable method (from scientific point of view), when being applied to literary studies, shows some crucial disadvantages. These disadvantages lie in the usage of the method for method itself, crucial changes made to the original texts in order to create their experimental versions and, the most important one, — inability to deal with text interpretation, a part of literary studies, which is one of the most important ones.
All of the things mentioned above lead me to the conclusion that, first of all, literature certainly can be a subject of a scientific study. But at the same time, scientific methods, which were applied to studying literary texts, cannot replace the other nonempirical methods, because they by their nature are meant to help scholars investigate different aspects of literary texts.
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