Rather than the minor and marginal ‘stylometrics,’ why not mention a well-developed and respected field of study (within infomatics / information sciences) more interestingly related to your topic: scientometrics?

It analyzes scientists’ research in the form that is most common and influential in science: namely, scientific LITERATURE from research journals. This field, beginning with Eugene Garfield’s work from the 1960s in the US, has become central to the organizing and operating of scientific communities as defined through their literature, which is the most important way in which they’re defined (a point which your article conveniently ignores). This study of the influence (following patterns of communication) of scientific literature using sophisticated software and metrics is now a huge business (e.g., ISI Scientific) and is central to how academic researchers are promoted (through their publications). There, you have a scientific approach to scientific literature, which would be a much more appropriate, sane, and interesting topic to write on. Looking forward to it.

How can your write this article after writing one from a fairly opposing perspective (“Yes, Virginia, There is a War on Science”) not long before that? Are you such a relativist, a wandering spirit, or a right-wing plant?

Recall the message of another article at this site: Manufacturing Uncertainty. That’s what Chris Mooney is up to, manufacturing uncertainty, although perhaps not for pernicious reasons. It could just be that Chris is lazy and needs to go back to school to see how things have really changed, rather than relying on the opinions of people working for right-wing think tanks.

Why is it important to understand science rhetoric, among other literary realities of science? Well, take a look at a more recent article at scienceprogress.org: Manufacturing Uncertainty (http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/05/manufacturing-uncertainty/). How ideas are used, organized, communicated through language is quite important to the scientific enterprise. So, beginning back in the 1970s when science studies first took off, it has been science and the general public that have benefited from literary studies perspectives (not debunking, but, rather, adding to the richness of scientific endeavor, the human quality of it). If you talk to scientists themselves, rather than cheerleaders for science such as yourself Chris Mooney, you’ll likely find that scientists have a much more open-minded and nuanced view of scientific practice than you could imagine if you’re bent on defending a dualistic “we’re right, they’re wrong” view of science (versus the social sciences & humanities).

And, if you want to see scientific method and tools in action in the study of “literature,” broadly defined, why not look at the many years of work applied linguists and language teachers, among others, have done in the area of corpus studies, using computer software to mine and analyze texts of all types. It’s a firmly established and growing field of study, unlike the very minor and insignificant “stylistics” you refer to.

I’m glad to see you’re still willing to defend the baby!

As someone also trained in this field–both of my academic mentors were old Chicago people, so I’m probably abnormally amenable in some ways and abnormally hostile in others to this line of thinking.

But my challenge to folks who want to drag science into interpretation has always been: show me an original insight that this approach produces; show me that this approach will produce interesting and engaging literary criticism.

Marxism, say, provided interesting and new insights into many texts (though it could get pretty patience trying when used exclusively). The handicap you work under, I’d say, is that what we would call Darwinian thinking has been part of the zeitgeist for a long time already–before Darwin, even–and that elements of Darwinian thinking have already been incorporated into both criticism and the literature itself.

Essentially, Darwin borrowed a lot of ideas that were floating around in political economy, moral philosophy & social theory of urbanizing European society and applied them to the natural world. But those ideas were a large part of what literature was already about.

To take Darwin’s specific applications of some of these ideas and reapply them to literature seems like a needless diversion and an recipe for an approach to literature that will be rather crucially skewed.

And people who claim that literary scholars aren’t interested in making fact claims–in accumulating durable knowledge–are simply out of touch with business in the field. In fact, literary scholars are regularly engaged in making some of the most rampant and sweeping fact claims about literature, science, race, gender, and just about everything else. The big difference between our claims and discourse in the sciences, is that we have almost nothing backing our stuff up except sheer magisterial assertion. The broader public, the broader intelligentsia, are basically onto this, which is one of the reasons why almost no one cares what literary scholars think about literature, science, race, gender, or just about anything else.
Jonathan

You sound like the guy in the old book who insisted that he was an expert in the theoretical side of natation and the fact that he could not, in fact, swim did not tell against his qualifications.

Keep us posted.