What is it about?
In past years, there has been a 'neuro-turn' which has started to claim that literary criticism can draw on neuroscience to understand how and why people read and respond to literary texts. Critics who support this work claim that brain imaging, for instance, can show how the brain responds to literary texts. These critics wants to use this kind of neuroscience to explain literary texts: to 'do' literary criticism in what they claim is a more 'scientific' way than other forms of literary criticism. This article explains the fundamental problems with such claims by examining two important areas drawing on such 'scientific' claims, one to do with so-called 'Literary Darwinism' and on to do with criticism of the work of the author Samuel Beckett.
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Why is it important?
This article is important because it shows that there are fundamental problems both with the way that 'scientific' claims are made by certain literary critics, but also that there are, equally, fundamental problems with the way that scientists make claims about 'literature'. Above all, the importance of this article lies in explaining what is at stake politically in making these kinds of claims about 'science' and 'literature', which is to do with the current political climate both specifically in relation to the Humanities but also in the widest sense.
Perspectives
This article is personally important to me because I am very concerned about the way funding and research time and interest is devoted to work with lacks scientific and scholarly rigour and yet insists on its own rightness. There is a great deal of hostility out there to questioning this supposed 'science' and even in engaging with certain forms of literary criticism which may diverge from what is seen to be 'acceptable' in this current time, and I think this is very dangerous, as I argue in the article. When academic debates become closed-off to certain views by definition and are not even willing to debate and discuss, but instead simply name-call or ridicule, then this is dangerous to the very undertaking of academic thought and scholarship. If scholars and academics no longer can discuss different -- even very different -- ideas and views, but simply decide on what they keep asserting is simply right and true, then we are in very dangerous territory in my view.
Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
University of Reading
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The object of neuroscience and literary studies, Textual Practice, November 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/0950236x.2016.1237989.
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