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2 Evidence Scientists scoff at each other’s theories but agree in basing them on the assumption that evidence, properly observed and measured, is true. —Felipe Fernández-Armesto While still graduate students in the early 1990s, my wife and I invited some friends to share Thanksgiving dinner. One of the friends was, like my wife and me, a graduate student in English. The other, however, was an outsider, a graduate student from geology. The conversation that night ranged over a wine-fueled spectrum of topics, but as three of the four of us were English majors, things eventually came around to literature. There was controversy when we came to discuss the “critical enterprise” and what it means to engage in literary research. The very term research was discussed and debated, with the lone scientist in the group suggesting, asserting, that the “methodology” employed by literary scholars was a rather subjective and highly anecdotal one, one that produced little in terms of “verifiable results” if much in the way of unsupportable speculation. I recall rising to this challenge, asserting that the literary methodology was in essence no different from the scientific one: I argued that scholars of literature (at least scholars of the idealistic kind that I then saw myself becoming), like their counterparts in the sciences, should and do seek to uncover evidence and discover meaning, perhaps even truth. I dug deeper, arguing that literary scholars employ the same methods of investigation as scientists: we form a hypothesis about a literary work and then engage in a process of gathering evidence to test that hypothesis. After so many years it is only a slightly embarrassing story. Although I am no longer convinced that the methods employed in literary studies are exactly the same as those employed in the sciences, I remain convinced that there are a good many methods worth sharing and that the similarities of methods exist in concrete ways, not simply as analogous practices. The goal of science, we hope, is to develop the best possible explanation for some phenomenon. This is done via a careful and exhaustive gathering of eviJockers_Text .indd 5 1/11/13 3:05 PM 6 Foundation dence. We understand that the conclusions drawn are only as good as the evidence gathered, and we hope that the gathering of evidence is done both ethically and completely. If and when new evidence is discovered, prior conclusions may need to be revised or abandoned—such was the case with the Ptolemaic model of a geocentric universe. Science is flexible in this matter of new evidence and is open to the possibility that new methods of investigation will unearth new, and sometimes contradictory, evidence. Literary studies should strive for a similar goal, even if we persist in a belief that literary interpretation is a matter of opinion. Frankly, some opinions are better than others: better informed, better derived, or just simply better for being more reasonable, more believable. Science has sought to derive conclusions based on evidence, and in the ideal, science is open to new methodologies. Moreover, to the extent possible, science attempts to be exhaustive in the gathering of the evidence and must therefore welcome new modes of exploration, discovery, and analysis. The same might be said of literary scholars, excepting, of course, that the methods employed for the evidence gathering, for the discovery , are rather different. Literary criticism relies heavily on associations as evidence. Even though the notions of evidence are different, it is reasonable to insist that some associations are better than others. The study of literature relies upon careful observation, the sustained, concentrated reading of text. This, our primary methodology, is “close reading.” Science has a methodological advantage in the use of experimentation. Experimentation offers a method through which competing observations and conclusions may be tested and ruled out. With a few exceptions, there is no obvious corollary to scientific experimentation in literary studies. The conclusions we reach as literary scholars are rarely “testable” in the way that scientific conclusions are testable. And the conclusions we reach as literary scholars are rarely “repeatable” in the way that scientific experiments are repeatable. We are highly invested in interpretations , and it is very difficult to “rule out” an interpretation. That said, as a way of enriching a reader’s experience of a given text, close reading is obviously fruitful; a scholar’s interpretation of a text may help another reader to “see” or observe in the text elements that might have otherwise remained...

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