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Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, by Joseph Carroll
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First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
- Sales Rank: #1228212 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-07
- Released on: 2004-03-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .69" w x 5.98" l, 1.07 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Review
Carroll is at his best (and that is very good indeed) when debunking and constructively criticizing the errors of others. . . . Indeed, his concluding essay is the best, most forceful and, indeed, biologically informed take-down of "spandrels" and the like that I have ever read. David Barash, University of Washington
Carroll's unswerving optimism is refreshing and lends a sense of inclusiveness and shared purpose to his work, all too rare in academic criticism. Tim Horvath, CogWeb
Literary Darwinism is a major work by a critic at the forefront of a developing paradigm . . . [that] requires the critics' thorough grounding in the biological and human sciences to do its important work. John Knapp, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
"If you want to know what's going to be the next big topic in literary theory, read this powerful new collection of essays by the author of" Evolution and Literary Theory. In "Literary Darwinism Joseph Carroll argues that we should stop basing our view of literature on penseurs who have long been obsolete in their own fields, and listen instead to what modern science has to tell us about that forbidden topic human nature.
."
-Robin Headlam Wells, University of Surrey Roehampton
"A brilliant exposition of a new paradigm in literary criticism which, because it is among the first to bridge modern biology and the humanities, has a feel of permanence to it.
."
-Edward O. Wilson
"A series of clear-sighted and far-sighted views of early and modern literary critical and evolutionary thought, as seen from the high ridge Joseph Carroll has climbed to in the most promising new territory in literary studies.."
-Brian Boyd
"These authoritative writings of Joseph Carroll focus, update, and solidify the insights of his landmark work, Evolution and Literary Theory. Collected into one volume, they now can serve as a handbook for students, critics, and academics, an invaluable introduction to the general theory and concrete practice of Darwinian literary analysis.."
-Harold Fromm, co-editor of The Ecocriticism Reader
"Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered."
-Denis Dutton, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, "Johns Hopkins University Press
About the Author
Joseph Carroll is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has published books on Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens. In Evolution and Literary Theory (1995) and in his subsequent writing, he has spearheaded the movement to integrate literary study with Darwinian psychology.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Category Mistake
By D. S. Heersink
The human imagination is the fount of extraordinary creativity. "Flights of fancy" take us to places and ideas that only the mind can conceive, places where we create our own reality, if only for a time, a place where only "credibility" is a gauge, and often not even that. We've created more deities in our image than any single god can hold. We've traversed Aquinas's labyrinth of angelic worlds were no human has ever gone, and probably never will. Milton took us to Paradise, and explains how we lost it. Dante takes us through hell, purgatory, and back to Paradise. Marx's Utopia is a wonderlust of wishful aspirations and neurotic tensions. Freud's landscape of the psyche is unparalleled in its imagination, however false empirically. Borges takes us into places we can't get out, and we love the dead-ends. Science fiction takes us to worlds we want to explore without the constraints of our present limitations. It's all wonderful, delightful, provocative, and truly human. It's also fiction. We sometimes forget that.
The imaginative arts allow us "freedom" that the sciences, for example, limit. But that "freedom" is our window into ourselves, a projection of every possible nuance one can imagine. It allows us to create and fabricate all sorts of "alternative realities," explore different possibilities, stretch our limits, and go in directions that physics won't allow. Even those "worlds" that bear close resemblance to our own, such as Shakespeare's or Byron's, are still distant lands. We take a journey into realms only our imaginations understand. We must never lose this precious inheritance. But we also must not "confuse" it for the real. Nor try to "codify" it with overarching theories of interpretative hegemony. It remains a frontier that should not be reduced to ideology or the scientific method. That is both perversion and a "category mistake." It boxes-in that vestige of energy that must not be contained.
At first blush, literary Darwinism seems eminently sensible, using sociobiological insights of "life" itself to better understand our "creative lives." After all, we are humans first, and understanding our biological natures surely aids our understanding of each other, not the least of which is our own creative projects. With this level of approach, I have no cavil. It is clearly superior to the dogmatic Ivory Tower Drivel that has infected the Humanities over the past half century. Having "a foot on the ground" cannot but help bring our Humanities folk back to reality. But I cannot endorse a new "empirical" literary theory to replace the old ideological paradigm, however more sensible, because it just adds another template through which to force us through a sieve.
Being empirically-oriented myself, I cannot fault an English-literature professor suggesting we "re-impose" some reality in our literary theory. It's long been absent. Moreover, he's working in an environment hostile to such "realities," but his treatment is worse than the disease. He's advocating placing readers under imaging devices (e.g., fMRIs) to measure their responses to the literary experience, to tabulate the data, and show how it comports with all the other evolutionary work done in anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, etc. This is positively garrish, a project Darwin himself would find repugnant!
Let's situate Carroll in his predicament, and try to understand why he would make such an outlandish proposal. As a former Arnoldean, steeped in the Liberal Humanistic Tradition, he's convinced that only an appeal to "empiricism" will lift off the shackles of the Postmodernist Hegemon that dominates the Humanities. He's convinced that the "entrenched interests" will not budge otherwise, because it's their "bread and butter" to be contrarian, subversive, and radically irrational. He may be right. Certainly the English Departments in Anglo-American academies are a species of their own. And their ideological spue is toxic as well as dissonant. Asking why it persists, despite the onslaught of criticism from all other disciplines, only validates Carroll's point. It's entrenched.
But there is more. Carroll claims that the nexus of Marxism, Freudianism, and Deconstructionism creates a "whole" theory of the "world," arguably false, but complete. This claim needs to be taken seriously, even if I find it preposterous. Do these ideological flights of fancy really make a composite whole? Carroll insists the "nail" was sealed with Deconstructionism, which denies everything but "rhetoric," and then makes rhetoric so indeterminate, that all that is left is the assertion of the "will to power." Marxism and Freudianism just fill-in on the margins when anxieties get too tough. It's an interesting claim. And, if the claim is true, why? Why are English Departments exempt from substantiating their dogmas? No other academic discipline is "allowed" this latitude.
These questions need answers before we start forcing the "arts" through the "scientific" paradigm. Gilbert Ryle's famous phrase "category mistake" just screams at this indiscretion. And the "cure" is just as unsettling as the "sickness." Again, don't misunderstand me. Biological insights certainly enhance our understanding of imaginative works, because they both herald from "life" itself. Here we're on common ground. But "empiricizing" the imaginative arts should seem terribly dissonant, and "measuring" the aesthetic experience is fundamentally incoherent. Even if it could be done, why would we? To save the Humanities from itself? The prescription is worse than the problem.
Notwithstanding this broader reservation, Carroll's articulate, incisive, and well-crafted Humanistic scholarship blends with sociobiological facts and theory to produce one of the most sustained indictments of the impoverished Humanities and a compelling raison d'etre to look to proven sociobiological theory, coupled with Wilson's advocacy of "consilience" (unity of knowledge), to move Humanistic Study forward to a far more promising frontier. There's no looking back.
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
A Potentially Revolutionary Contribution
By Jonathan A. Gottschall
The various essays, articles and book reviews comprising Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism are rooted in two principles: first, humans share a common nature that can be revealed through the scientific method; second, this universal nature is the product of relentless Darwinian selection over eons. While this is obviously orthodox stuff in the world of behavioral biology, these notions remain quite heretical among the social constructivists who continue to dominate the world of literary studies. From Carroll's simple principles flow corollaries with large implications for literary studies and behavioral biology. The most important corollary for literary scholars is that a large proportion of all that has been said, written, or merely thought in the realm of literary theory and criticism over the last several decades is obviously and often breathtakingly wrong. This is because all of the dominant "poststructuralist" approaches--Lacanian, Foucauldian, Marxist, radical feminist, deconstructionist, and others--are organized around an adamantine core of social constructivist theory that is profoundly at odds both with Darwinian theory and with practical research in what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."
Carroll's argument is really quite simple. All literary criticism and theory is ultimately based on theories of human nature (even the theory that there is no such thing as human nature is a theory of human nature). Literary scholarship constructed on unsound theoretical foundations--on essentially faulty premises about human tendencies and potential--must itself be unsound, no matter how internally self-consistent. The chapters of Literary Darwinism articulate Carroll's vision of a foundation-up reorganization of literary studies along Darwinian lines. Carroll describes a Darwinian Literary Study where judgments about literary plots, characters, and themes are rooted in the bedrock of evolutionary theory, are disciplined by the findings of scientific research, and, when possible, are tested using scientific methods.
Literary scholars and evolutionists who are interested in the concept of consilience will also be interested in Literary Darwinism, which represents one of the most serious and sustained attempts to establish consilience between the humanities and behavioral biology-and to plumb its implications.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
A new paradigm
By Stephen A. Haines
The greatest mind of the 19th Century, perhaps of any century, was that of Charles Darwin. If any mind of the 20th Century might be said to equal Darwin's it would be that of Edward Osborne Wilson. An entomologist, it was Wilson who demonstrated the implications of insect societies for human cultures. His ideas were first promulgated in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" and bore full fruit with "Consilience" in 1998. In "Consilience", Wilson proposed that, as humans were as much a part of Nature as any other creature, our behaviour traits, including the arts and literature, should be viewed in the light of evolution. Wilson demonstrated how the human spirit would be expanded, not diminished, by such a framework. The research ensuing since "Sociobiology" has affirmed Wilson's insight. How would such scenario apply to literature?
Joseph Carroll, a literary critic, incorporates Wilson's insights throughout this collection. Carroll argues that our outlook on the world would be expanded, not confined, by consciously applying Darwin's principles to our literature. Many authors, he notes, have done this through an intuitive sense. Jane Austen, hardly a Darwinian, still presented her characters fully integrated within their natural environment. Austen distinguished between which environments suited a character and which left the individual feeling displaced. For Carroll, this is an encouraging sign. Observant and astute writers can apply what he calls the "Darwinian paradigm", imparting a more natural and plausible foundation to fiction. He wants new writers to understand how to employ those principles from the outset. In this, Carroll is following where Wilson is pointing. The result, Carroll feels, will be an improved basis for literature's production and analysis.
Narrative itself, not only common to the human condition, but apparently necessary to it, reflects our ancestral past. As Wilson pointed out, human beings are a social, not a solitary, animal. Carroll's thesis furthers this idea by noting that narrative accounts are a means of identification within a community. Depicted human interactions must reflect that situation and be based on firm knowledge of Darwinian principles, not on assumptions nor sketchy awareness. He criticises authors who pay lip service to the "Darwinian paradigm" without truly understanding its tenets.
Carroll's thesis is based on what is known as "the Adapted Mind". Our mental states, whether in writing or reading, are derived from the long evolutionary path we've traversed. We aren't separated or "elevated" from it. Much of his attention is given to revealing the false notion of "poststructuralism" - that there are no "truths" [whether absolute or relative] and that authors have no intent in their writings, simply expression formed by local "culture". Darwin's idea, for example, could only have occured in Victorian Britain. Obviously, in such a framework, evolutionary roots have no role in composition, reading or criticism. It seems trite when Carroll writes "the subject matter of literature is human experience", but he feels we need to be reminded of that truth. Writing, he contends, must reflect that truism more forcefully than is often the case. Steps have already been taken, he notes. Such works as "Biopoetics" and "Homo Aestheticus" are indicators of a more realistic approach in fiction.
Carroll's three part collection - a view of the "literary landscape", theory and practical criticism, and assessments of Darwian biographers and critics, is a splendid example of how consilience works. He is opening a new frontier of both writing and reading, and is optimistic for its success. He stresses that a merger of the humanities and sciences, is not only desireable, but necessary. A better knowledge of ourselves must involve a better knowledge of our world. That can only be beneficial to all humanity and its habitat, using literature as a means. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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