I wouldn’t have likened the literary analysis to science until I read this phrase from Interdisciplinarity: “if theories are disprovable, they can be tentatively accepted until they are falsified.” While we can’t necessarily prove a point concerning literature wrong, right is subjective and unattainable because of each interpretation’s inherent worth. According to Moran, Popper doesn’t claim that science is in line with relativism. On the other hand, literary interpretation is relativistic in its nature. My reading of Cane may contradict a classmate’s, but neither claim completely invalidates the other. This idea reminded me of when we discussed “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” in class. The group in which I participated had diverging, captivating ideas. We deliberated whether the poem could have been about an encounter with dangerous repercussions, or that perhaps the woman’s conductivity ‘lit up’ the narrator’s life. Later in our time, we thought about the poem as a personification of industrialization in the north, accompanying our city vs. country motif. Just as Popper proposed, we tentatively accepted a proposal until we could (and we can’t immediately in literature studies) dismiss it.
English Majors Practising Criticism