10 MAY, 2012
Graphing Jane Austen: Using Science to Extrapolate the Human Condition from Victorian Literature
<STRONG class=by>by Maria PopovaWhat literary Darwinism reveals about universal values.
In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the tragic disconnect between science and the humanities in his famed “two cultures” lecture. Half a century later, Jonah Lehrer called for the creation of a “fourth culture” of knowledge that would bridge the divide. In Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning, researchers Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Daniel Kruger, and Jonathan Gottschall — who gave us the fascinating The Storytelling Animal earlier this week — embody Lehrer’s vision and bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship by borrowing from the evolutionary biology and modern data analytics to construct a model of human nature that explains the evolved psychology of character dynamics in nineteenth-century British novels.
Using the framework of the model, they asked a sample of several hundred readers to give numerical ratings on 2,000 characters from 202 British novels, including all of Jane Austen’s.
This exercise in literary Darwinism produced three key findings: (1) these novels have determinate “agonistic” structures of meaning — centered on protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters — that can be captured using the model’s framework; (2) the perceived differences between protagonists and antagonists are much more structurally pronounced than the differences between male and female characters; and (3) the agonistic structure of these novels fulfills an adaptive social function, wherein literature articulates and cultivates specific social values.
A few of the findings (PDF) follow, in unnecessarily ugly academic graphics. (Please, oh, please, would some talented literature-loving information designer care to spruce them up?)
For more on the article see the link below
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/10/graphing-jane-austen/
