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Empirical Literary Studies: An Introduction

It is both timely and fitting that Anglistik as the journal of the German Association for the Study of English publishes an issue on Empirical Literary Studies (ELS). It is fitting because many of the early attempts to establish ELS were undertaken in Germany (cf., e.g., Groeben 1977; Schmidt 1980), and the "International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature" was also founded in Germany in 1987 (cf. Schmidt 1989). The publication is timely because after a long time of existing at the fringe of the discipline "Literary Studies," ELS is currently experiencing a moderate but unmistakable upswing of its institutional fortunes. The establishment of the MaxPlanck-Institut für Empirische Ästhetik in Frankfurt in 2012 was both one of the most spectacular symptoms and a major accelerator of this trend. The latest step in this development is the foundation of ACCELS – the Aachen Center for Cognitive and Empirical Literary Studies – at RWTH Aachen University. That it took ELS so long to take off is hard to understand at first glance. Why would Literary Studies restrict itself to dealing with professional interpretations and neglect the huge majority of reading processes, those of ordinary readers who read for pleasure and who do not have any training in literary analysis? In confining itself to highbrow interpretations, Literary Studies failed to account for exactly those phenomena that make its subject – literature – most relevant for cultures: its power to fascinate, move, and impress people of all backgrounds and ages. There are, we think, three major reasons for this strange situation: a) Especially in English and American Studies, the dominance of text-centered approaches was hard to overcome. After the long age of New Criticism, structuralists and poststructuralists also focused on the sign system independent of its use by individual readers. Particularly in Deconstruction, the text "always already" did this or that, regardless of what readers did in the reading process (Spivak 1976, LXXVIII, and, for a more extensive analysis, Strasen 1996, 37-94). This provided a theoretical climate that was rather hostile to empirical approaches to literature. b) The most mundane, but certainly not least important reason is that literary scholars are usually not trained in empirical methods. Consequently, there is always the danger of dilettantism when people with a hermeneutic training try to conduct empirical research. c) Early empirical studies of literary phenomena tended to be even more modest in scope than they are today, a tendency that did and does not sit well with literary scholars who – in many cases – tend to be after the really big questions. This led to a certain impatience with empirical studies of literature, or as Mick Short put it in 2001: