Old Email Archive

digest 1998-10-19 #003.txt


Friday
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
-> Re: Characteristics of science (was Re: Quietude....)
by "Jussi Hirvi" 
-> Re: Quietude
by Everdell@aol.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 16 Oct 1998 14:06:53 -0700
From: "Jussi Hirvi" 
Subject: Re: Characteristics of science (was Re: Quietude....)
- ----------
>From: "Jussi Hirvi" 
>To: Society for Literature and Science 

>Subject: Re: Characteristics of science
>Date: la 17. loka 1998 00:00
>
>Joseph Duemer  wrote:
>
>[about an eight-part list of the characteristics of science]
>
>>When I asked the students (primarily engineering and science
majors)
>>in my Imagining Science course whether they thought such a list
>>could be constructed for literature, and if not why not, they
looked
>>at me as if I had just emerged from a silvery saucer-shaped
space
>>ship. (I'm sure some of you are familiar with this reaction.) I
know
>>this is a sort of "undergraduate" question,
intentionally ignoring
>>all the sophistications of post-modern analysis, but since at
least
>>some of you have said you wouldn't mind a little less
"quietude" on
>>the SLS list, I solicit your reactions.
>
>
Greetings,
I'm glad of this new activity on the list.
Here is an undergraduate answer to an undergraduate question:
Partly, yes. For the most part, not at all.
The whole setup dividing the system to a neutral, invisible subject,
and
an objective reality "out there" is largely incompatible with
the study of
literature, and indeed with any process of observation, as the many
post-modern revisions of the philosophy of science (especially
constructivistic accounts) now tell us.
To say this would have been very embarrassing a couple of decades ago
--
it would then have amounted to saying that study of literature is not
really
a science.
Now we have been told about postmodernism, and we know that no science
is
really done so very "objectively", and never has been.
I think this is not really an issue requiring complicated
"sophistications of post-modern analysis". The thing is in a
way quite
simple: you cannot detach the observer from the observed without
destroying
the whole action of observation. The physico-mental observer, in
his/her
cultural context, is the tool by which observations are made. So, the
observer is not neutral at all. In observation, properties of the
observer
are by necessity read into the observed. [Source: Heinz von Foerster.]
This is so in natural sciences, but most of all it is so in humanistic
sciences like study of literature.
Why? Well... THAT might be kind of complicated question, opening doors
to
many directions.
I can here only refer to the special type of "data" involved
in study of
literature. When a person reads a book, the "data" is largely
converted from
dumb letters to images, patterns, gestalts. Understanding images and
reading
meaning into them is a process which takes more than the mere rational
faculty -- I don't know which part of the brain are active there, but
the
process touches the whole human being, including unconscious processes
and
bodily sensations, not only as processes located in the brain. The
whole
process could probably be characterized as metaphoric. Literary
perception,
in any case, is not passive observation of ready-made reality [of
texts,
"information", meanings], but essentially an interactive
process.
Maybe I could pass on this last chapter to all of you for further
comments.
Jussi Hirvi
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 16 Oct 1998 21:20:05 -0700
From: Everdell@aol.com
Subject: Re: Quietude
In a message dated 10/16/98 2:44:03 AM, you wrote:
<>
Well, perhaps if you had asked them whether such a list WAS literature
or not,
you might have had an even odder look.
I love the question.  I'm wondering if there's a good answer.
- -Bill Everdell, Brooklyn