On the perceived complexity of literature. A response to Nan Z. Da

Abstract

At the center of Nan Z. Da's article is the claim that quantitative methods cannot produce any useful insights with respect to literary texts: "CLS's methodology and premises are similar to those used in professional sectors (if more primitive), but they are missing economic or mathematical justification for their drastic reduction of literary, literaryhistorical, and linguistic complexity. In these other sectors where we are truly dealing with large data sets, the purposeful reduction of features like nuance, lexical variance, and grammatical complexity is desirable (for that industry's standards and goals). In literary studies, there is no rationale for such reductionism; in fact, the discipline is about reducing