Literature Should Be Taught Like Science - Issue 97: Wonder

In the past quarter century, enrollment in college English departments has sunk like the Pequod in Moby Dick. Meanwhile enrollment in science programs has skyrocketed. Elon Musk, not Herman Melville, is the role model of the digital economy. But it doesn't have to be that way, says Angus Fletcher, 44, an English professor at Ohio State University. Fletcher is part of "group of renegades," he says, who are on a mission to plug literature back into the electric heart of contemporary life and culture. Fletcher has a plan--"apply science and engineering to literature"--and a syllabus, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, his new book. Before the England-born Fletcher got his Ph.D. in literature at Yale, he earned an undergraduate degree in neuroscience, followed by a four-year stint in a neurophysiology lab at the University of Michigan. He switched careers when he realized the biology of the brain wouldn't take him far enough toward understanding our need for stories. "What's special about the human brain is its power of storytelling," Fletcher says.