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.