Science, Fiction

Less underwhelming than the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (to be fair I’ve never read any of her stuff), were the stories leading up to the announcement. Here’s some good stuff from the AP’s.

This year, Danish literature professor Anne-Marie Mai revealed she had nominated Bob Dylan because she was upset about Englund’s predecessor’s critical remarks about American literature.

…

Dylan is believed to have been nominated several times before, but doesn’t quite fit the profile of a Nobel literature laureate. Besides primarily being a songwriter, his mass following could also be considered a minus by the Swedish Academy, which often chooses writers who are unfamiliar to the everyday reader.

However, Dylan is considered by many prominent literary critics to be a major poet, his song lyrics worthy of serious study.

Dylan’s literary merits aside, Nobel watchers note that anyone can be nominated for the six Nobel awards in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics, but that doesn’t mean they have any chance of winning.

Also,

British wartime leader Winston Churchill missed out on the peace prize despite two nominations, but his oratory and his works of historical scholarship earned him the literature prize in 1953.

Who knew?

Oh my! They used Kafka in a scientific study, and he caused people to do better!

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

…

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

What a cool study. Let’s take twenty minutes today and read A Country Doctor because it’s great.

And for the record, I hate it when people describe Kafka’s work as “Kafkaesque,” even with a wink. Gimme a break.