An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study

Abstract

1. The Current Institutional Position of Literary Darwinism Over the past thirteen years or so, evolutionary literary study has emerged as a distinct movement, and that movement is rapidly gaining in visibility and impact. More than a hundred articles, three special journal issues, four edited collections, and about a dozen free-standing books have been devoted to the topic. Many other articles and books are in press, under submission, and in preparation. Commentaries on the field have appeared in newspapers and journals all over the industrialized world, including notices in Nature, Science, and The New York Times Magazine. As it has gained in visibility, the movement has also attracted a good deal of criticism from diverse disciplinary perspectives--from traditional humanism, poststructuralism, cognitive poetics, and evolutionary social science. In four previous articles--the first in this journal in 2002, the most recent in 2007-I have surveyed contributions to the field, aiming at bibliographic inclusiveness. (1) In this present article, I shall not replicate those bibliographic efforts. Instead, I shall briefly describe some of the more important contributions, discuss key theoretical issues, and respond to representative critiques. The central concept in both evolutionary social science and evolutionary literary study is nature: genetically mediated characteristics typical of the human species. In the concluding paragraph of the survey I wrote in 2002, I said that do not yet have a full and adequate conception of human nature. We have the that are necessary for the formulation of this conception, and we are on the verge of synthesizing these elements (611). Over the past six years, that effort of synthesis has advanced appreciably. In a subsequent section, I lay out a model of human nature that incorporates the features on which most practitioners in the field would agree. One crucial element of human nature remains at least partially outside this consensus model: the disposition for producing and consuming literature and the other arts. Within evolutionary social science, divergent hypotheses have been formulated about the adaptive function of the arts. Theorists disagree on whether the arts have adaptive functions, and if they do, what those functions might be. The alternative hypotheses on this topic involve alternative conceptions of human evolutionary history and human nature. They are thus vitally important to the whole larger field of evolutionary social science, and they also have important implications for the practical work of interpretive criticism. I shall lay out the main competing hypotheses, criticize them, and make a case for one particular hypothesis. I shall also discuss two problems that are more particularly concerns for literary study: the challenge of generating new knowledge about literature, and the challenge of mediating between the discursive methods of the humanities and the empirical methods of the social sciences. The most modest claim that could be made for evolutionary literary study is that it is one more or school that merits inclusion in casebooks and theoretical surveys. Along with Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructive, and New Historicist essays, one would thus have a Darwinian reading of this or that text, Hamlet or Heart of Darkness, say. Most casebooks of course do not yet include a Darwinian reading, and in truth the Darwinists have had a hard enough time even getting panels accepted at the MLA. My own favorite rejection note explained that the program committee felt that the Darwinian approach was too familiar and that what was wanted were proposals along more innovative lines--this in a year in which proposals with Lacanian, feminist, and Marxist themes achieved levels of production comparable to those of the American and Soviet military industries in the latter days of the Second World War. In his superbly witty parodies of literary schools in Postmodern Pooh, Frederick Crews includes a chapter on the evolutionary literary critics, ridiculing them in tandem with their peers in more firmly established schools, but this was merely an act of kindness. …

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