The above might be a rather grand title; but then, it is a rather grand subject. In our post-Enlightenment age, there is no area to which we will not bring the blunt hammer—or fine scalpel, however you view it—of science. There is perhaps a certain contingent which will not accept this. Certainly, that’s true of religious fundamentalists, but it’s also true of certain literary figures, who consider a scientific understanding of literature hardly an understanding at all, and only hopelessly and meaninglessly reductive. It’s probably true that it is reductive to think of art as serving a specific evolutionary purpose, or to analyse a musical phrase in terms of its frequencies and the resulting brain-wave reactions. But that is not to say that nothing can be gained from such a reduction. Indeed, it may be true that more can be gained from it, even while accepting that literary criticism, in the classical sense, and a scientific analysis of literature, are, as Stephen Jay Gould might put it, non-overlapping magisteria. [Read more →]