Making a science of literary criticism

Since the emergence of “literary criticism” as a university subject in the 1880s, there have been those prepared to challenge its disciplinary status. How can something as subjective as literature be taught, let alone examined? Throughout the 20th century, the success of the sciences fostered methodological anxieties, resulting in several efforts from within the humanities to set the study of literary texts on a more scientific footing. In recent years, this scientisation of the study of literature has increasingly come from outside the humanities, as cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists expand their efforts to explain culture in terms of biology. So where does this leave “lit crit”?