Alice's Response

From English 194 Wiki

It is interesting to look at what may come of the interaction between scientific exploration and the humanities. However, I can’t help but feeling that McCarty does not gain much from it, perhaps even managing to reify the unscientific nature of literary theory and then somehow draw the sciences into that realm as well.

The benefit of the model, McCarty says, is its ability to be manipulated and the knowledge that may be gained through imperfections found in, and modifications made to it. He highlights, then, the subjective position taken in modelling, the guesswork required in such analysis, the fictionality of models and further, the ability for fictions to be models themselves. “Modelling is performative” (53) and “an imaginative act” (72), McCarty claims, which seems beneficial in terms of literary study, but which surely brings his scientific method into the realm of fictionality. Rendering scientific explorations uncertain and inconclusive, does he not undermine them and thus negate what he is trying to do?

McCarty tells us that no answers can be gained from modelling, only further questions. Well that works for literary theory, but what is then actually gained from his modelling method? What is really learnt of the personifications in Ovid’s Metamorphoses? And although a lot of time is spent discussing modelling, is this even actualised in his own example? It seems to me, for example, that after describing what a model is in the first section of the chapter, he then provides the reader with exactly what it is not – maps, diagrams and charts – the very things in which he has previously found imperfections.

There is a high probability that I have not fully understood this dense text, but what I do know, is that I was not satisfied by the time I had finished reading it. Is modelling the way forward in regards to knowledge of the “humanities in a digital age” (71), or are there too many flaws?