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

Across the academy, disciplines flock for scientific status, keen to demonstrate that their approach to their subject matter is scientific. How might literary criticism achieve anything like this sort of methodological consonance? Looking at the history of twentieth-century attempts, from Northrop Frye’s macrostructural systematizing and Roman Jakobson’s microstructural analysis, through to the collapse of the structuralist project and the recent strategic embrace of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, this book looks at what hopes remain for a science of literary criticism and draws on the work of such thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Kurt Vonnegut to investigate the consequences of adopting a scientific perspective toward literary study. With an increasing number of departments teaching literature and science courses, the question of what literary study stands to gain (and what it might risk) from cleaving to the sciences is especially pressing.