What should this research report look like when I get done?  I last took an English class when Jimmy Carter was president, and didn’t like it much. I only got “A”s because I gamed the grading system. As a consequence of those youthful traumas, I have no desire for this project to generate papers like English teachers assign. But I’d better review those instructions, at least because they contain a list of mistakes not to make, and also because it would be horribly embarrassing to overlook anything that’s in them.

My favorite search engine can find me a million sources that will tell me how to write a literary analysis. What do I find?  Three generic classes of misses, two hits.

• Mechanical processes that won’t teach anybody anything
• Useless exhortations
• pre-fabricated powerpoint course materials for schoolteachers (students of the 21st Century, you have my pity)
• A thing that’s really interesting!  Instructions for how to think about papers, instead of how to generate them by mechanical processes.
• Corey Olsen‘s recorded lecture for the Mythgard Institute “On the writing of papers”. (It’s on line here, but that link only works for Signum U students, alas.)

I’ll skip all the parts of Prof. Olsen’s lecture that deal with the propensity of students to do the minimum necessary for a grade, since I am a passed master at that now-useless skill. Beyond chasing grades, though, anyone who thinks up his conclusion first and then looks for evidence to support it is an enemy of all true scientists, and not welcome to our fellowship. I have no need for encouragement on that point.

I am definitely going to take Prof. Olsen’s advice about “deductive” versus “inductive” approaches to writing. Inductive papers are the papers I’ve most enjoyed reading.

Tom Hillman tells me that literary analysis should be approached the same way as scientific analysis, which suggests another possibility.  A standard lab report consists of:

1. The subject under study.
2. The hypothesis to be investigated.
3. The method to be used, including apparatus and procedures
4. Experimental observations
5. Discussion of results
6. Conclusion

This has echoes of the dreaded five-paragraph essay, but step #3 is the critical difference.  The idea that a research report would have to define its methods and equipment is fairly new. For example, Sparrow gives credit to the Lexos tool, which is the first time I’ve seen it in print.  As more of us scientists get into the field, though, expect more of it. I don’t imagine that it would get a good reception if we used numbered sections the way we do in a scientific journal, but burying the structure in a narrative flow would work.

This fits in nicely with the inductive structure. The hypothesis can be expressed as a question, where a thesis statement is supposed to sound like a settled fact. Expressing it as a question raises an issue, while neatly solving the problem with induction that Prof. Olsen pointed out — that the reader doesn’t know where the paper is going until the end. Then the experimental-observations section forms the inductive chain, and the discussion section ties it all into a coherent whole. The conclusion section answers the essential “So What?”

This exercise was prompted by a discussion on one of Sorina’s forums:  “I’d like to write a literary analysis, but I’m a scientist.”  She suggested that I get an M.A. in Literature, and then write a book.  Two objections to that: 1) I need a master’s degree like I need a hole in the head; 2) I just finished three years working as the ground crew for my wife as she earned an M.S., and I’m not interested in continuing the experience in the first person.  So I’ll stay an amateur for now, on my good days, and a dilettante otherwise.

Why should a physicist be sticking his nose into literary analysis, anyway?  Some recent news bumped this up in the queue of things I have to think about.

It’s a fact of life that elderly physicists have a tendency to wander outside their area of expertise. In theoretical physics, all but the most brilliant tend to peak in their 30’s.  So what do you do with the next 4-5 decades of your life? Alas, some of us decide we should do research in some other field, with lamentable results.  So how do I know I’m not That Guy, and about to make a fool of myself?

I think this is the answer:  Literature, like history and unlike science, is not about absolute truths. It’s about the relationship between a reader and a text.  This may be the most profound thing I’ve learned from Mythgard Academy: that the writer doesn’t get to say what the meaning of a work is; the reader does.  I infer that literary analysis doesn’t have a stopping point, because every new reader brings a new relationship along.  (After all, there are still hundreds of universities advertising degrees in Shakespeare Studies.)  So there’s plenty of room for my perspective, as long as I can find something interesting to say.

Scientists have a (possibly unfair) advantage, too.  The spectacular achievements of the sciences over the last couple of centuries have the denizens of the rest of the trees in the Groves of Academe looking on with envy. Example:  Michael Drout talking about how cool it is to be able to say “the prototype is on my desk”.  Another example: all the positive reactions to Sparrow Alden’s statistical analysis of The Hobbit. Bringing quantitative analysis to bear on literature is a wide-open field.  Conclusion:  between a unique perspective and new methods of analysis, I can jump into this field without certainty of disaster.

The Mid-Atlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium, which I attended in October 2015, was a literary conference under the aegis of the Mythgard Institute. Mythgard may be a unique institution.  It’s a school of the liberal arts in which half of the participants are people who know literary scholarship well, and the other half are scientists with no particular knowledge outside our own specialties. We (I count myself among the latter half) just love fantasy and science fiction, and want to talk about it.

By the end of the day, an observation was unavoidable: Talks given by the literati were just plain better than those given by the scientists. That’s not surprising, since a scattering cross-section calculated by a physicist is likely to be better than one calculated by an expert in Anglo-Saxon grammar, but it dampened my plans for contributing a talk myself. I want to give one of the good talks.

Searching the Web for a how-to was (predictably) fruitless. That means I’ll have to figure it out for myself.  This blog will document my attempt to find a way to create valuable literary scholarship, from a starting set of skills that have nothing to do with literature.