Literature+systematic and organized study = a science?!

"So while no one expects literature itself to behave like a science, there is surely no reason why criticism, as a systematic and organize study, should not be, at least partly, a science." -The Archetypes of Literature


This class has rekindled and ushered in old thoughts and ways of looking at life that I have, for a time, set aside. I am minoring in writing, but I am a Fish and Wildlife major, so the majority of my time over the past few years has been spent in the sciences. As a result I have looked at everything through a pair of science glasses (hypothetically speaking) that have kept me focused mainly on analyzing, studying, hypothesizing, etc. data in order to come up with new ideas and/or conclusions. I have now come to find out, thanks to this class, that not only is everything literary (even my books on Mammology and microorganisms !!) but the process of criticism can also be considered a science.

Up to this point, I had separated my two fields of study almost completely, not seeing that (as Fry suggests) the process by which we read and "criticize" literature is much like that of a scientist. With literature, we can also analyze, hypothesize, search for new ideas, and systematically study the words, the meanings, the language, and the rhetoric used within the writings, just as we do in the field of biology with its unique data. What a concept....to think that I have been engaging in science across the board of my education, in both the areas of Wildlife Management and English. This realization has shattered the small box that I had consequently put myself into, and helped me to create more of a oneness between my fields of study.