A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Abstract

Nancy Easterlin. A Biocultural Approach Literary Theory interpretation. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2012.315 pages.We so-called literary Darwinists-Nancy Easterlin I count ourselves membershave yet find a very cozy home among our fellow academics. One of most recent prominent of responses our work is an article Critical Inquiry by Jonathan Kramnick, which, putatively sobered by attention it has received, particularly outside academy, he offers an attempt to take seriously central premises of Darwinian program literary studies. Predictably, article, like response its critics that appears a year later, is nothing of kind: it is an attack upon his own caricature of that program-as bad theory hatched from bad science resulting criticism incapable of saying anything about literary or forms.Nancy Easterlin's book should change all of this. It is, without exception, best work yet field, represents a high-water mark literary theory criticism. Easterlin is a committed Darwinian-that is, she accepts evolutionary scenario as sufficient explanation for existence of beings, for their behavior, their thinking, their handiwork, including literature-but she is also a pluralist who thinks that ideally practiced, would employ an a priori model that it presumes has application vast majority of literary texts (34). Her arguments maintain a philosophically coherent view of beings while illustrating how different applications of interdisciplinary research can illuminate problems dramatized literature (34). The research is wide-ranging sophisticated-encompassing evolutionary, developmental, cognitive psychology; bioepistemology, cognitive linguistics rhetoric, more-and analyses of individual poems, stories, novels that this research helps illuminate are not only important but often dazzling their complexity, subtlety, lucid precision. Easterlin does not take as her goal a 'move closer science' by discovering 'an adaptive function that is specific art or literature proper,' as Kramnick claims all literary Darwinists do; rather her aim is to demonstrate literary specialists that literature may be for many things that a biocultural approach has broad application across literatures, topics, subfields (34). She also does not accept claim of Joseph Carroll (whom Caleb Crain early anointed pope of literary Darwinism [37]) that the primary purpose of literary criticism, as an objective pursuit of true knowledge about its subject, is identify specific configuration of meaning any given text or set of texts (23). Literary meaning, though not endlessly deferred any radical sense, can never be recovered objectively for Easterlin, since reading is a dynamic, interpretive, so inevitably subjective process, and it is that process that meaning is configured and, perhaps, knowledge is glimpsed (23).If Easterlin is a Darwinian, then, she is a doubting Thomas (Crain's phrase [37]) Carroll's pope. She asserts, against such homogenizing of literary Darwinists as we find Kramnick, that, in point of fact, [they] have only one shared assumption: that findings about psychology behavior prove illuminating for study of artifacts (11). The might that sentence dike perhaps one that concludes previous paragraph) suggests real strengths of Easterlin's approach: she is, although a true believer an evolved human nature, modest cautious her extrapolations of that belief, generous her contextualizing of literary texts, framing them not only biologically culturally, as her title suggests, but also socially, historically, biographically, alert always fact that literary are artful products of meaningmaking, not (or not always) musings of a species mulling its eternal concerns, as Carroll his disciples seem sometimes interpret them. …

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