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The New Interdisciplinarity Many conceptual and methodological changes have swept the social sciences in the last decades. As a result of this paradigm shift, it is hardly possible now to proceed in the social sciences without some form of mathematical analysis and/or empirical research. The emergence of new research disciplines like neuro-linguistics, artificial intelligence, or psycho-physics also points to a growing interdisciplinary confidence in the study of human affairs. Although most progress has been confined to domains where the stochastic nature of processes involved offers a known way of quantifying their results, important steps have also been made elsewhere. In this brave new age, even such elusive concepts as using your ace serve in a game of tennis are tackled by mathematics-specifically, by game theory. On a more serious note, game theoretic analysis has also led John Banzhaf's successful court challenge of the weighted voting system used by Nassau County, New York, and a wholesale revision of the seat allocation process in the US House of Representatives.1 In contrast, literary scholarship, left on the sidelines of these new developments, seems largely quaint and anachronistic, despite libraries of professional publications on theory and methodology. Literary critics have, of course, staged several groundbreaking forays into such domains as linguistics, structuralism, semiotics, statistics, and even information theory, in search of more rigorous analytic tools. Sadly, these superficial alliances with more established and rigorous disciplines have failed to produce much of substance. As Richard Levin points out in "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism" (1993), the interdisciplinary exchange is, as a rule, restricted to the appropriation of a few central metaphors that flourish indiscriminately in the critical discourse. Little effort goes into the adaptation of the methods that made these metaphors so successful in their

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