1) I started as an economics major and now teach and study literature for a living. Here's a short Monday morning thread (especially for students) on how that happened and why I still value perspectives from where I started.
2) In college I paired political science w/ econ, ended up dropping econ for legal studies (thinking I'd go to law school). Let go of econ bc the people teaching it to me were speaking of certainties that didn't seem at all certain. I lost trust in it.
3) This experience prejudiced my orientation to the social sciences in general. By the time I realized this and mustered the resolve to change something, I was about to graduate. I took one literature course in college, a Victorian lit. survey. That's it.
4) I'm not saying this implausible certainty is actually the way of professional economists, but that was the pedagogy of those courses. It was actually a history of political thought class--cross-listed in history & political science--that introduced me to literature in college.
5) We read Hobbes, Rabelais, Wollstonecraft, etc. The fictional models of politics were more compelling than the social-scientific ones, at least to balance out social science approaches that dominated my coursework. From that point I decided to look toward fiction as model.
6) Using fiction as a model is not a bad way of describing what I do in my research and teaching today. And though it began as a reaction to econ, I've never lost sight of the modeling idea in social science (it obviously means something different, but analogous).
7) This is to say: I use fiction to study the kinds of questions philosophers, political theorists, etc. ask and answer. This sets me at odds with much of my own field, and on the margins of these other fields. Students: this is not a bad thing! It's very generative!
8) So: Don't discount literature as a source of knowledge. Don't think the kind of imaginative work that generates fiction is an inferior model of things *in reality*. Accordingly, don't be shy about working with economists and soc. scientists*. We can hone models together. /end
*Of course, they should want to work with you too. press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
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