Papers by Georgia Theoklitou
This essay begins by briefly describing the current methodological crisis in literary study, a di... more This essay begins by briefly describing the current methodological crisis in literary study, a discipline which we argue adheres to an outmoded image of the human brain’s interaction with language and an insistently subjective approach. We then go on to outline the quantitative model of literary study currently being developed at the University of Binghampton by the critic Jonathan Gotschall and the biologist David Sloan Wilson. We describe what we perceive as the strengths of this methodology, which brings the notion of statistical analysis and empirical fact into the space where evolutionary psychology and literary study interact. We also note that we have discovered what seem to us to be weaknesses in Gotschall’s pilot study, which first came to light through our knowledge of the history of the production of the book Legends of Vancouver by E. Pauline Johnson. Having described this history in some depth, we return to Gotschall’s study and show that, although we have revealed a colonialist assumption that weakens its conclusion, this does not challenge the validity of his methodology. Indeed, we argue, the fact that we can challenge Gotschall’s conclusions empirically rather than through rhetoric actually demonstrates the strength of his methodology. Finally, we outline a future research project.
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Papers by Georgia Theoklitou