Use A Spreadsheet For Literary Criticism

It's More Accurate

I really like the way the writer portrays something or other, and how nuanced his use of blah blah blah. However, I am surprised that such an eminent personage as Dr Bunkoff would dismiss Jenkins’ theory so lightly.... (A typical book review)

Literary criticism is all so vague. I mean, it’s like trying to grasp a cloud.

How about a more mathematical approach? I tried this out, using a chapter from Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs. I noted how many examples of humour there were on each page, and how many examples of pathos. I entered all these numbers in a spreadsheet, and turned them into a graph. You can see the result below:

Analysis of a chapter from Unreliable Memoirs. Terry Freedman

Now that’s what I call literary criticism. None of this airy-fairy rubbish, but good solid numbers, and a graph to boot. If one carried on applying this approach to the whole book, and taking into consideration more criteria, you would be able to see the shape of the entire narrative at a glance. You wouldn’t even have to read anything.

In fact, you wouldn’t even need to read the book if you didn’t like the graph — because you would know in advance exactly what kind of a book it was going to be.

I shall be writing to the Education Secretary to suggest that this approach be adopted in schools. Why should kids have to wade through stuff like this…

Why, thou clay brained guts, thou knotty pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow catch! (Henry IV, Part 1)

… when they could simply look at a graph instead?

If book blurb writers had any sense, they wouldn’t put wordy descriptions on the back cover of books. No, they would put a graph there, or perhaps a sort of nutrition label in which elements of the book are color-coded, and given percentages:

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Ingredients:

Humour 5%

Horribly gruesome stuff 17.5%

and so on.

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Bottom line: the trouble with Eng Lit specialists is that they put too much store by words alone. Come on, let’s have some hard facts in the form of numbers as well.

A final comment:

Although this article has been written a little tongue-in-cheek, I do think the data-oriented approach has some merit. It enables you to see the arc of a story at a glance, even though the values used may be arbitrary. (It’s how they stand relative to each other that matters.)

I will be illustrating this soon, in my analysis of Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand.