On Subjectivity in “Structural Analysis of Narrative”

Ok, so I’m an English major, and one of my wonderful roommates is a Christian ministries major with a minor in business. Just the other day as she was doing some reading that she had to digest and make sense out of for homework, she said, “I wish I could just be doing math problems right now. Then I would know there was a right answer. This reading is all subjective.”

For AGES, math/science-type people have always been commenting to literature-type people that our work is easier; we don’t have to arrive at an exact answer like they do because anything goes when you’re just reading and interpreting a book.

If my roommate had expressed this to Todorov, he would’ve told her that her idea was “untenable” (NA 2102). He would certainly disagree with this idea, and he also disagrees with the popular argument against using scientific principles in literary analysis (NA 2102), that “…science must be objective, whereas the interpretation of literature is always subjective” (NA 2101). Todorov argues by saying that “ [t]he critic’s work can have varying degrees of subjectivity; everything depends on the perspective he has chosen. This degree will be much lower if he tries to ascertain the properties of the work rather than seeking its significance for a given period or milieu.”

So Todorov is saying that yes, there can be an amount of subjectivity when a work is being critiqued, but if you take a structuralist perspective, the amount of subjectivity will lessen as opposed to if you tried to critique a work based on its context. I would agree with this point that Todorov is making. Whenever I get the “reading is all subjective” comments, my instinct is to think no it isn’t, and to say that there are certain components that a work is critiqued on; one can’t get away with saying just anything in their interpretation of literature.

But then Todorov says, “On the other hand there is no social science (or science whatsoever) which is totally free of subjectivity.” So how does this make sense, and how does this help the structuarlist argument he is trying to make?

Well Todorov is saying that science itself is also subjective because choosing theoretical concepts require a subjective decision, and then he defends literary analysis by scientific principles by saying “[t]he economist, the anthropologist, and the linguist must me subjective also; the only difference is that they are aware of it and they try to limit…[it]” (2102).