Sit with statisticians and commit a social science: Interdisciplinary aspects of poetics

Abstract

It is argued that the establishment of interdisciplinary programs with autonomy from traditional departments of language and literature is necessary for successful development of scientific poetics. Poetics deals with the relationships of textual elements to each other and to extra-textual variables. Many of the questions it seeks to answer have been investigated by other disciplines and most ultimately require the use of quantitative or statistical methods that have been developed in these disciplines. Interdisciplinary programs would provide access to these findings and training in these methods. Such programs would also provide alternatives to the non-statistical linguistic-structuralist paradigm that now dominates poetics. A comparison of the scientific study of science and that of literature shows more rapid growth in the former. This can be traced to a utilization of statistical methods that has generally been lacking in poetics. Problems with implementing the proposed programs in traditional departments of language and literature are outlined. The basic problem would seem to be that the goals of poetics and of traditional humanistic scholarship are essentially antithetical.