Aug 29, 2017 - Edited by David H. Richter. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ...... Austin,. TX: University of Texas Press. Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. ... Reading Edith Wharton through a ...
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The Historical Provenance and Main Contentions of Evolutionary Literary Theory
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In the first two thirds of the twentieth century, most social scientists rejected the idea of “human nature”: characteristics that are genetically transmitted and species‐typical and that produce cross‐cultural regularities in behavior (Pinker 2002). Since the 1960s, evolutionary social scientists have transformed psychology, anthropology, and related fields, giving decisive evidence that evolved characteristics direct and constrain human behavior (Buss 2016). In the mid‐1990s, a few literary scholars began assimilating the findings of evolutionary social science (Cooke and Turner 1999; Storey 1996; Carroll 1995). Literary scholars affiliated with the evolutionary social sciences now constitute a movement represented by a few dozen books and a few hundred articles and book chapters. Terms that have been used to describe that movement include “biopoetics,” “adaptationist literary study,” “biocultural critique,” “evolutionary literary study,” and “literary Darwinism.” Much of the earliest work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of adaptation by means of natural selection, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas. More recently, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured. Evolutionary literary study typically adopts a naturalistic world view and an epistemology closely aligned with the scientific realism espoused by Karl Popper and Konrad Lorenz (Popper 1979; Lorenz 1977). Translated into disciplinary terms, these attitudes became affiliated with biologist E. O. Wilson’s program for “consilience.” Wilson argues A Companion to Literary Theory, First Edition. Edited by David H. Richter. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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that the world is a unified causal order and that knowledge forms an integrated field encompassing the physical sciences, the social sciences and the humanities (Carroll, McAdams, and Wilson 2016; Wilson 1998). Literary scholars who adopt this view regard evolutionary biology as the pivotal discipline uniting the physical sciences with the social sciences and the humanities. They believe that human evolution has produced complex functional structures in human anatomy, physiology, and nervous systems—structures that prompt and constrain motives, emotions, and forms of cognition. They acknowledge that culture is extraordinarily important for the human species, but they argue that the genetically transmitted characteristics of human nature shape cultural practices, including forms of imaginative culture such as religions, ideologies, myths, legends, rituals, graphic images, sculptures, songs, poems, stories, dramas, and films. They seek to identify the precise ways the components of human nature are organized in diverse cultural configurations. They use the term “biocultural critique” because they believe that imaginative culture cannot be adequately explained without reference to human nature, and conversely, that human nature cannot be adequately explained without reference to imaginative culture.
The Institutional Position of Evolutionary Literary Scholars
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Evolutionary literary theorists and critics occupy a peculiar position in the intellectual world. They have received a good deal of favorable attention in general‐interest magazines, major newspapers, and prestigious scientific journals (Whitfield 2006; Max 2005). They find encouragement in the proliferation of best‐selling non‐fiction books in the evolutionary social sciences—books that attract large numbers of educated readers outside of academic literary study. Nonetheless, within the academic literary establishment, they constitute a small and embattled minority (Smith 2016; Kean 2011; Kramnick 2011). Evolutionary literary theorists have typically defined their ideas by contrasting them with the poststructuralist ideas that still dominate the academic literary establishment— for instance, with deconstruction, Foucauldian cultural critique, Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist gender theory. By valorizing scientific knowledge and repudiating the idea that culture alone determines human identity, the evolutionists have set themselves against the mainstream tendencies in their profession. A few evolutionary publications have sought reconciliation with the academic establishment by advocating an intellectual pluralism parallel to the political, ethnic, and religious pluralism of civil society (for instance, Easterlin 2012). Most evolutionary publications have aimed not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory, but rather at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted (Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall 2010; Gottschall and Wilson 2005). The more uncompromising evolutionary literary theorists aim at establishing a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately at encompassing all other possible approaches to literary study. They acknowledge that other schools give access to some significant aspect of the human experience depicted in literature—for instance, to class conflicts and the material base for imaginative superstructures (Marxism); to relations of power in hierarchical social structures (Foucauldian cultural critique); to the psycho‐ symbolic dimensions of parent–child relations and the continuing force of childhood
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experience (psychoanalysis); to universal mythic images derived from the ancestral experience of the human race (archetypalism); to elemental forms in the organization of time, space, and consciousness (phenomenology); to the irrepressible conflicts lying dormant within all partial resolutions (deconstruction); or to socially inflected gender identity (feminism and queer theory). While acknowledging that each such school offers access to significant aspects of literary works, the evolutionists maintain that whatever is true in other schools can be assimilated to an evolutionary understanding of human nature. They argue that evolutionary theory is broader, deeper, and more consistent than any competing theory of literature. They claim a unique advantage in being affiliated with a scientific research program that can progress by accumulating convergent findings, correcting its mistakes, and giving a precise measure of epistemic validity through its appeal to empirical methods.
Governing Ideas in Evolutionary Biology
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To make effective use of research in evolutionary social science, literary scholars need to understand five basic ideas from evolutionary biology that govern that research: adaptation by means of natural selection, sexual selection, inclusive fitness, differential parental investment, and life history. The causal forces designated by these terms have regulated the evolution of all specifically human characteristics, including motives, emotions, social dispositions, family relationships, gender identities, and cultural capacities. Natural selection is a mechanical biological process: more are born in every generation than can survive; capacities for survival and reproduction vary among organisms of the same species; organisms better equipped for survival and/or reproduction are more likely to pass on genes into the next generation, and thus also to pass on their more successful capacities. This mechanical process, first described by Darwin, is the basis of all complex functional structure in living things, including human motivational and cognitive s ystems. When scholars or scientists speak of “human nature,” “human universals,” “species‐typical behavior,” or “genetically transmitted characteristics,” they are referring to the complex functional structures produced through adaptation by means of natural selection (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Darwin 1859). The term “sexual selection” refers to the evolution of traits that aid in the competition for mates, either through attracting mates of the opposite sex or through competing against members of the same sex. Like natural selection, sexual selection produces innate, genetically encoded features in organisms, including human organisms. It is one main source for the biological component in gender identity. In debates over the adaptive function of the arts, one prominent hypothesis is that the arts function as sexual displays for attracting mates (Dutton 2009; Miller 2000). Inclusive fitness is the standard technical term for passing on genes, either through producing offspring or aiding kin. (Kin are organisms with overlapping genomes.) The Darwinian conception of evolution has often been casually reduced to two imperatives: survive and reproduce. By expanding the idea of reproduction to include kin relations, inclusive fitness theory makes it possible to understand why extended families and lineages were the nucleus of ancestral social groups, why they remain default forms of social
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o rganization in the absence or failure of states, and why they continue to be so important emotionally, even in complex modern societies with smoothly functioning civic institutions (Fukuyama 2011; Foley and Gamble 2009). Differential parental investment is the idea that the parent investing more in offspring (in most but not all species the female) is also the choosier in selecting mates. In research on human sexual psychology, differential parental investment is an explanatory matrix for ideas about the partially overlapping but also conflicting reproductive interests of males and females, which in turn provides a framework within which to analyze gendered power relations. That framework can incorporate aspects of feminist gender theory and also demonstrate the limitations in that theory (Carroll et al. 2012, ch. 4). Life history theory analyzes the organization of the life cycle for any species into distinct phases, reproductive activities, and (for some species) social roles. Human life history theory investigates the way reproductive and social adaptations have interacted with ecological factors to produce the specifically human organization of the life cycle: birth, extended infant dependency, extended childhood, pair‐bonded dual parenting combined with cooperative male coalitions, cooperative child care, post‐reproductive longevity, and death. Life history theory provides a comprehensive framework for the analysis of human motives, values, and feelings. When authors or fictional characters ask about the meaning of life, their answers often depend on what kind of value they place on the various phases and social roles of the human life cycle (Carroll 2012b, 2012e). By explaining human childhood and parent–child relationships as integral parts of an adaptive complex, life history theory offers a scientifically grounded alternative to Freudian theories. By explaining the systemic interactions between pair‐bonded dual parenting, male coalitions, and cooperative childcare, life history theory locates gendered power relations in contexts more ancient and psychologically deeper than the contexts offered in social gender theory. From the perspective of evolutionary literary theory, this complex of five evolutionary ideas is not a toolkit of analytic concepts to be deployed in an ad hoc, impressionistic way, intermingling with ideas from other literary schools. It is instead a foundational structure within which all other concepts must be organized. It is also a selective filter for those other concepts. It encompasses all living things, so necessarily all of human life. A thoroughgoing evolutionary form of literary theory will assimilate many ideas from lower levels of analysis in both the social sciences and the humanities, but those ideas will necessarily be reshaped to form part of a coherent conceptual structure integral with the foundational ideas in evolutionary biology.
The Evolution of Specifically Human Characteristics
The most important evolutionary concept unique to humans is gene‐culture co‐evolution: the causal interaction between biological adaptations and cultural contrivances. Specifically human biological adaptations include bipedalism, hands with fine motor control, a large brain, lengthened childhood, longevity, post‐menopausal survival, and a suite of cognitive and emotional adaptations enabling language, shared attention, insight into other minds, and intensive social learning. These biological adaptations have given rise to cultural
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contrivances such as tool use, control of fire, cooking, pastoralism, agriculture, cities, symbolic communication, and the construction of social and political institutions (Henrich 2015; Cochran and Harpending 2009). Animals of other species sometimes learn socially and use tools. No other species regulates its activity through traditions deriving from cumulative innovations in technology, social organization, and forms of imaginative culture such as religion, ideology, and the arts. Humans are highly social animals. Literature is itself a social medium. Authors are individuals embedded in social environments. They write in order to be read by other socially embedded humans, and they typically describe social relationships. In order to be useful for literary theory, evolutionary social theory has to be comprehensive and complex enough to account for specifically human social relationships. Through most of the latter part of the twentieth century, evolutionary social theory had not yet achieved that level of adequacy. Evolutionists sought to explain human social behavior through two main principles: inclusive fitness, and reciprocation or mutual back‐scratching. Those basic biological terms were correct so far as they went, but they were not comprehensive. They could not adequately account for the evolution of cooperative social complexity that pervades all of life, from nucleated single‐celled organisms through multicellular organism to social species (Calcott, Sterelny, and Szathmáry 2011). Leading evolutionary theorists have now overcome this deficiency by identifying two other basic causal factors in social evolution: (1) group selection or competition among social groups; and (2) network reciprocity, that is, the capacity to interact selectively with cooperators and to avoid or punish non‐cooperators (Nowak 2006). This set of four basic biological principles for the evolution of sociality across the whole spectrum of living things forms a framework within which evolutionists have identified six basic features in specifically human social evolution: (1) dominance or the aggressive assertion of power; (2) egalitarianism or reverse dominance—the collective suppression of dominance in individuals; (3) leadership, that is, individual activity that organizes collective effort for achieving common goals; (4) internalized norms that make shared values an integral part of individual identity; (5) third‐party enforcement of norms, that is, behavior in which individuals and groups incur costs to sustain the integrity of the social order; and (6) legitimacy in the exercise of power, that is, power exercised in ways that are generally acknowledged to conform to the shared values of the social group and to achieve purposes common to the group (Carroll 2015a, 2015b). Over the past several decades, academic literary theory has been heavily social in orientation, focusing on asymmetrical power relations and emphasizing dominance, exploitation, and resistance—concepts summed up in the term “power.” From an evolutionary perspective, domination forms only one part of the total complex of factors that characterize human social relationships. Social relationships also include internalized norms, willing cooperation, and the incorporation of group identity into individual identity. Literary criticism that takes account of all these factors should be able to give a more nuanced account of the social relations depicted in literary works, and should also be able to open up richer explanations of the psychological and social functions fulfilled by writing and consuming those works. Among humans, the adaptations most directly relevant to passing on genes are those geared toward organizing individuals into family units and kin networks. The passions at
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work in sexual, marital, family, and kin relationships shape and color individual lives. Accordingly, evolutionary anthropologists, psychologists, and literary scholars have devoted much attention to these core reproductive relationships (Saunders 2015, 2009; Salmon and Shackelford 2011; Gottschall 2008b; Nordlund 2007). The relationships most closely involved in passing on genes are not the only social relationships in which humans are involved, and these relationships are not the only subjects in literature, but they are central to a large proportion of literary works, and it would be difficult to identify any very substantial body of literary works in which they are absent or trivial. In rejecting traditional humanism in the 1970s and 1980s, proponents of poststructuralist literary theory deprecated the significance of individual persons. The death of the author was accompanied by the herding of individual readers into interpretive communities defined by collective forms of discourse. From an evolutionary perspective, individual persons remain indispensable units of organization in all social groups and in all literary analysis. Each individual person forms part of a network of social relationships that partially determine individual identity. Nonetheless, all cognition and feeling take place in some individual mind, some individual brain and body. Each individual person shares in the genetic inheritance of the human species; each is embedded in some particular culture, which can be analyzed as a particular configuration of universal human potentials; but each is also a unique individual, with a history of experiences similar but not identical to that of other individuals. Authors, readers, and fictional characters are all individuals. For the analysis of individual persons in literary study—fictional or real, characters, authors, and readers—useful concepts are provided by evolutionary developmental psychology, which deals with issues such as attachment between a mother and her child; by personality psychology, which identifies five main factors that differentiate personality in individuals; by narrative psychology, which examines the way each individual human constructs a personal life story and also locates that story within the larger mythic and ideological narratives of his or her social groups; by cognitive neuroscience, which offers insight into the basic mechanisms through which humans take the perspective of others and share in a collective mental life; and by research on emotions, which offers explanatory access to genres such as horror, comedy, or tragedy, that are defined essentially by their emotional tone (McAdams 2016; Carroll 2012e; Carroll et al. 2012; Clasen 2012; Boyd 2009; Easterlin 2000).
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The Adaptive Functions of Literature and the Other Arts
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Humans spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy in the pursuit of the arts (Gottschall 2012; Dutton 2009; Dissanayake 2000). Do the arts in some fashion aid survival and reproduction? If so, how? The answers we give to these questions will necessarily have profound implications for the way we think about both human nature and the arts. Hitherto, evolutionary theorists have reached no consensus on the adaptive function of the arts, and in that one crucial respect, the human evolutionary paradigm remains incomplete. One version of evolutionary psychology reduces all aspects of the mind, including the arts, to forms of sexual display, like the tails of peacocks and birds of paradise, the r itualized
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dances in courtship displays in many species, or the elaborately decorated bowers of male bower birds (Dutton 2009; Miller 2000). From this perspective, the arts would contribute to reproductive success but would have no primary adaptive function. The bulk of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Proponents of an early and influential form of evolutionary psychology envisioned the mind as a set of “modules,” neural mechanisms adapted to solving problems of survival, reproduction, and social organization specific to the hunter‐gatherer ecology in which humans evolved (Kenrick 2011; Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow 1992). That conception of the mind can be contrasted with a conception that identifies general intelligence and cognitive flexibility as important adaptive features of the human mind (Geary 2005; Wilson 1998; Mithen 1996). Theories of the modular mind tend either to ignore the arts altogether or to discount them as a side effect of cognitive mechanisms that evolved to solve practical problems in a hunter‐gatherer ecology. From this perspective, the arts can be explained as non‐adaptive means of exploiting pleasure circuits in the brain. That argument, most prominently propounded by Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works, has become a center of controversy and discussion among evolutionary literary theorists and aesthetic philosophers (Carroll 2012a, 1998; Dutton 2009; Pinker 2007, 1997: 521–38; Salmon and Symons 2004; Tooby and Cosmides 2001). Among the various adaptive functions that have been postulated for the arts, and especially for fictional narratives, some adhere closely to practical problem‐solving. Adaptive functions postulated for fictional narratives include providing useful environmental information and delivering didactic messages (Scalise Sugiyama 2001); presenting listeners or readers with game‐plan scenarios for dealing with adaptive problems they might someday face (Pinker 1997: 538–43); and teaching listeners or readers about human nature (Saunders 2015; Scalise Sugiyama 2005). Postulated functions that are less closely tied to practical utility and that also extend beyond fictional narrative include providing a medium for shared social identity (Carroll et al. 2012; Boyd 2009; Dissanayake 2000); fine tuning mental organization (Salmon and Symons 2004; Tooby and Cosmides 2001); enhancing pattern recognition (Boyd 2009); and stimulating creativity (Boyd 2009). These various particular functions can all be subsumed within one comprehensive idea about the arts: that they affect cognitive and emotional organization, influence motives, and thus help regulate behavior. Human beings can assess their own behavior, make conscious decisions about value structures, and subordinate immediate impulses to abstract concepts and symbolic figurations. Drawing out the implication of this idea, some theorists have argued that humans live in imaginative virtual worlds that have co‐evolved with cognitive flexibility (Carroll 2012a; Gottschall 2012; Dissanayake 2000; Wilson 1998, ch. 10). In this conception of human nature, humans have followed a unique evolutionary trajectory that has partially detached behavior from regulation by instinct. Perceptions and sensations do not enter the human mind as a series of tightly channeled stimuli that release a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors. Human minds contain a complex array of percepts, inferences, causal relations, contingent possibilities, analogies, contrasts, images, metaphors, and hierarchical conceptual structures. Humans reflect on their own mental life, imagine other minds, and imagine themselves reflected in the minds of others. They locate present reality within memories of the past and anticipations of the future. They create their own personal life stories and situate those stories within the legends and myths
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of their social groups. They create elaborate conceptions of the natural order, often populate that order with supernatural agents and spiritual forces, and picture their own actions and the actions of others within that order. Theorists of imaginative virtual worlds argue that for humans, alone among animal species, behavior takes on a definite value and meaning only within an imaginative structure—some emotionally charged order of symbols made vividly present to the imagination through aesthetic form. That would explain why the arts penetrate so deeply into religions and ideologies.
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Naive forms of evolutionary literary criticism presuppose that literature depicts characters behaving in species‐typical ways (Barash and Barash 2005). More sophisticated forms acknowledge that species‐typical forms of behavior are differently organized in different cultures; that those differences have systemic effects on subjective experience; that individuals often vary both from the species‐typical and the culturally typical; that meaning in literature lodges not exclusively or even primarily in what is depicted but rather in the stance authors and readers take toward a depicted subject; that meaning in literature is subjective and affective, so that tonal modulation forms an integral part of any literary figuration; and that meaning and effect necessarily include the formal aesthetic properties of literary works—for instance, verbal style (diction, syntax, and rhythm), the interaction of realism and symbolic imagery, the use of motifs, and the interplay of perspectives among authors, characters, and readers (Carroll 2012e). Evolutionary literary critics have it within their purview to characterize the phenomenal qualities of a literary work (tone, style, theme, and formal organization); locate the work in a cultural context; explain that cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions (including cultural traditions); identify an implied author and an implied reader;examine the lives of actual authors and the responses of actual readers; describe the socio‐cultural, political, and psychological functions the work fulfills; locate those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature; and link the work comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal elements, affective elements, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature. In practical reality, there is only so much any critic can do within any given interpretive study, but each of these features of evolutionary literary criticism has been deployed at some point and in some combination with other features (Boyd 2009; Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall 2010; Carroll 2011, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d; Clasen 2010, 2011, 2017; Gottschall 2008b; Hoeg 2009; Jonsson 2013; Kjeldgaard‐Christiansen 2016; Marshall 2013; Michelson 2009; Nordlund 2007; Saunders 2009, 2012; Schrage‐Früh 2012; Turpin and Fuhrman 2012; Winkelman 2009). Most evolutionary literary critics still use the discursive, speculative methods characteristic of the humanities. A few evolutionary literary scholars have assimilated empirical methods from the social sciences and a few evolutionary social scientists have taken literature as their subject matter (for example, Oatley, Mar, and Djikic 2012; Gottschall 2008a). In one large‐scale project, evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars worked together to conduct a study of “agonistic structure”—the organization of
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characters into protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters—in British novels of the nineteenth century (Carroll et al. 2012). To produce a template for the analysis of fictional characters, Carroll et al. (2012) constructed a model of human nature that includes: (1) a set of motives derived from human life history theory; (2) a set of basic emotions derived from cross‐cultural ethological research; (3) a set of mate‐selection criteria derived from differential parental investment theory; and (4) a set of personality factors established in empirical personality psychology. The elements from this model of human nature were incorporated in an online questionnaire that contained the names of about 2,000 characters from 200 novels. Respondents were asked to choose one or more characters and to fill out a questionnaire on each character selected. More than 500 respondents completed a total of 1,470 questionnaires on 435 characters from 134 novels. By correlating features of identity in characters with the positive and negative emotional responses of readers, Carroll et al. (2012) aimed at identifying the structure of values that prevails across the whole body of novels—values shared by authors and readers. They conjectured that protagonists would embody values of which authors and readers could be expected to approve, and that antagonists would embody values of which authors and readers could be expected to disapprove. Carroll et al. (2012) found that antagonists are motivated almost exclusively by a desire for dominance (power, wealth, and status), and that protagonists are strongly motivated by self‐effacing prosociality. In interpreting these results, the authors invoke anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s (1999) observation that in order to promote cooperation hunter‐ gatherers universally suppress dominance behavior in individuals. Before the relatively recent advent of agriculture, all ancestral human populations were hunter‐gatherers. Evolutionary social scientists, whether or not they adopt a “modular” conception of the mind, commonly suppose that many social and cognitive adaptations specific to hunter‐ gatherer lifeways have been preserved in modern populations. Drawing a parallel between stigmatizing dominance in hunter‐gatherers and in Victorian novels, Carroll et al. (2012) conclude that the novels satisfy evolved social needs for participating in a cooperative social group characterized by an egalitarian ethos. This large‐scale conclusion derived from the data on protagonists and antagonists was complemented with chapters devoted to analyses of the ethos in specific literary works for which especially abundant data had been provided: the novels of Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. (A separate website had been set up to for Hardy’s novel, and specialists in Hardy scholarship had been solicited to fill out questionnaires on characters in that one novel.) These two case‐study chapters integrate quantitative results with interpretive procedures derived from humanist traditions of close reading. For instance, survey results revealed that Austen’s male protagonists are more nurturing and put less emphasis on female beauty than the average in the other novels in the study. That finding feeds into an interpretive argument about the desexualized character of the relationship between the eponymous Emma and her consort Knightley. Survey results for The Mayor of Casterbridge reveal that no character in the novel excites the kind of emotional interest excited by average protagonists and antagonists in the study’s other novels. That finding supports an interpretive argument that Hardy in this story is not inviting emotional identification with characters but instead is fulfilling his own need for exercising stoic detachment from emotional turbulence. Setting that argument in tension with the three
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models of tragedy used by previous critics to interpret the novel, the authors conclude that these models are not only inconsistent with each other but are also out of sync with the responses of readers. Calling into question the interpretive tradition for Hardy’s novel, that conclusion also suggests that theories about genre could be productively constrained by empirical research into reader responses. Since the emotional responses of readers are grounded in evolved motivational dispositions, that research should itself be constrained by an evolutionary conception of human motives and emotions. The collaborative study described here gives evidence that scholars and scientists from the humanities and social sciences can pool their differing forms of expertise to produce significant interpretive results. In putting into play a model that incorporates motives from human life history theory, mate‐selection theory, the theory of basic emotions, and the five‐factor system of personality theory, this study also suggests new ways in which evolutionary social scientists can integrate diverse forms of research into human identity. And finally, it opens up new avenues for using fictional characters in psychological research (McCrae, Gaines, and Wellington 2012). Interdisciplinary collaborative research by humanists and social scientists offers potential for new discoveries in both the humanities and the social sciences. In all likelihood, that potential would be realized most fully if disciplinary and curricular structures were altered in ways that promote training simultaneously in humanist subject matters, the empirical and quantitative methods of the social sciences, and humanist interpretive methods (Carroll 2013; Gottschall 2008a).
The Future
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Assuming evolutionary literary study does not simply disappear, its institutional fortunes could follow any one of three trajectories: remaining on the margins of the academic literary establishment; being incorporated as just another of many different schools of literary theory; or fundamentally transforming and subsuming all literary study (Carroll 2010). If one were to base predictions on the current status of evolutionary study in the humanities, the first or second path might seem the most likely. If one were to base predictions on the inherent appeal of developing knowledge, the third might seem most likely. Unlike Marxism, Freudianism, deconstruction, and anti‐ essentialist gender theory, evolutionary biology is firmly established as a scientific paradigm, a nexus for a vast network of research extending from microbiology through ecology to the social sciences and humanities. Among currently available source ideas for literary theory, only the evolutionary understanding of human nature offers the prospect for a cumulative development of literary knowledge consistent with a broad range of scientific knowledge. The first generation of evolutionary social scientists faced stiff resistance from within their own fields (Kenrick 2011), and evolutionary scholars in the humanities face opposition even more stubbornly entrenched. At present, applicants who overtly profess sympathy for evolutionary literary theory find most graduate programs closed to them. The speed of institutional change will depend on the opening up of programs to train doctoral students.
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Carroll, Joseph. 2012a. “The Adaptive Function of the Arts: Alternative Evolutionary Hypotheses.” In Telling Stories / Geschichten Erzählen: Literature and Evolution / Literatur Und Evolution, ed. Carsten Gansel and Dirk Vanderbeke, 50–63. Berlin: de Gruyter. Carroll, Joseph. 2012b. “An Evolutionary Approach to Shakespeare’s King Lear.” In Critical Insights: The Family, ed, John Knapp, 83–103. Ipswich, MA: EBSCO. Carroll, Joseph. 2012c. “The Extremes of Conflict in Literature: Violence, Homicide, and War.” In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, ed. Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes‐ Shackelford, 413–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Joseph. 2012d. “Meaning and Effect in Fiction: An Evolutionary Model of Interpretation Illustrated with a Reading of ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’.” Style 26: 297–316. Carroll, Joseph. 2012e. “The Truth About Fiction: Biological Reality and Imaginary Lives.” Style 46: 129–60. Carroll, Joseph. 2013. “Teaching Literary Darwinism.” Style 47: 206–38. Carroll, Joseph. 2015a. “Evolutionary Social Theory: The Current State of Knowledge.” Style 49: 512–41. doi: 10.5325/style.49.4.0512.
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Barash, David P. and Nanelle R. Barash. 2005. Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press. Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall. 2010. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Buss, David M. 2016. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Calcott, Brett, Kim Sterelny, and Eörs Szathmáry. 2011. The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carroll, Joseph. 1995. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Carroll, Joseph. 1998. “Steven Pinker’s Cheesecake for the Mind.” Philosophy and Literature 22: 478– 85. doi: 10.1353/phl.1998.0036. Carroll, Joseph. 2010. “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism.” New Literary History 41: 53–67. doi: 10.1353/nlh.0.0144. Carroll, Joseph. 2011. Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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The Darwinian revolution that has taken place in the social sciences will in all likelihood ease the way for evolutionary humanists. So long as social scientists ascribed causal power to social and cultural forces alone, humanists also could comfortably ignore biology. The larger intellectual context within which the humanities operate has now fundamentally changed (Horowitz, Yaworsky, and Kickham 2014). The humanities are increasingly isolated from other fields in the university and from the interests of generally educated readers. Institutional inertia within the humanities is in tension with the pressure exerted by the mass and creative energy of serious intellectual life outside the humanities. Resolving that tension would make it possible ultimately to achieve a full and satisfactory understanding of imaginative culture. That understanding would ground the humanities on the bedrock of scientific fact, and it would also consummate the explanatory potential in the evolutionary social sciences.
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