Darwinian literary studies
Encyclopedia
Darwinian Literary Studies (aka Literary Darwinism) is a branch of literary criticism
that studies literature
in the context of evolution
by means of natural selection
, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology: evolutionary psychology
, evolutionary anthropology
, behavioral ecology
, evolutionary developmental psychology
, cognitive psychology
, affective neuroscience
, behavioural genetics
, evolutionary epistemology
, and other such disciplines.
and the forms of cultural imagination, including literature and its oral antecedents. By “human nature,” they mean a pan-human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition. Because the Darwinists concentrate on relations between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural configurations, they often describe their work as "biocultural critique.”
Darwinian literary studies arose in part as a result of dissatisfaction with the poststructuralist and postmodernist
philosophies that came to dominate literary study during the 1970s and 80s. In particular, the Darwinists took issue with the argument that discourse
constructs reality. The Darwinists argue that biologically grounded dispositions constrain and inform discourse. This argument runs counter to the central idea in the standard social science model
: that culture
wholly constitutes human values and behaviors.
Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study. They rally to Edward O. Wilson’s cry for “consilience” among all the branches of learning. Like Wilson, they envision nature as an integrated set of elements and forces extending in an unbroken chain of material causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest levels of cultural imagination. And like Wilson, they regard evolutionary biology as the pivotal discipline uniting the hard sciences with the social sciences and the humanities. They believe that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment. They argue that for humans, as for all other species, evolution has shaped the anatomical, physiological, and neurological characteristics of the species, and they think that human behavior, feeling, and thought are fundamentally shaped by those characteristics. They make it their business to consult evolutionary biology and evolutionary social science in order to determine what those characteristics are, and they bring that information to bear on their understanding of the products of the human imagination.
In its simplest, crudest forms, evolutionary literary criticism consists only in identifying basic, common human needs—survival, sex, and status, for instance—and using those categories to describe the behavior of characters depicted in literary texts. More ambitious efforts pose for themselves an overarching interpretive challenge: to construct continuous explanatory sequences linking the highest level of causal evolutionary explanation to the most particular effects in individual works of literature. Within evolutionary biology, the highest level of causal explanation involves adaptation by means of natural selection. Starting from the premise that the human mind has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment, literary Darwinists undertake 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 responses of actual readers (for instance, other literary critics), 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.
Contributors to evolutionary studies in literature have included humanists, biologists, and social scientists. Some of the biologists and social scientists have adopted primarily discursive methods for discussing literary subjects, and some of the humanists have adopted the empirical, quantitative methods typical of research in the sciences. Literary scholars and scientists have also collaborated in research that combines the methods typical of work in the humanities with methods typical of work in the sciences.
. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll
(Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated models of reality. By participating in the simulated life of other people one gains a greater understanding of the motivations of oneself and other people. The idea that the arts function as means of psychological organization subsumes the ideas that the arts provide adaptively relevant information, enable us to consider alternative behavioral scenarios, enhance pattern recognition, and serve as means for creating shared social identity. And of course, the arts can be used for sexual display. In that respect, the arts are like most other human products—clothing, jewelry, shelter, means of transportation, etc. The hypothesis that the arts help organize the mind is not incompatible with the hypothesis of sexual display, but it subordinates sexual display to a more primary adaptive function.
There are also proposed explanations for the structures found in and the differences between different genres. On example being the different features of and gender preferences for pornography
and romance novel
s which have been contrasted and explained by sexual selection
theories. Another that poetric meter
is based on a biologically based three-second metric. Still another is that different genres correspond to different basic emotions with tragedy
corresponding to the basic emotions of sadness, fear, and anger; comedy with the basic emotions of joy and surprise; and satire with the basic emotions of anger, disgust, and contempt. Another view is that tragedy often discusses the basic evolutionary problem of status conflict while comedy often discusses the similarly basic evolutionary problem of mate selection. The satiric dystopian novel has been described as presenting a conflict between human evolutionary needs and an oppressive state ignoring these.
Cognitive Rhetoric: Practitioners of "cognitive rhetoric” or cognitive poetics
affiliate themselves with certain language-centered areas of cognitive psychology. The chief theorists in this school argue that language is based in metaphors, and they claim that metaphors are themselves rooted in biology or the body, but they do not argue that human nature consists in a highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Cognitive rhetoricians are generally more anxious than literary Darwinists to associate themselves with postmodern theories of “discourse,” but some cognitive rhetoricians make gestures toward evolutionary psychology, and some critics closely affiliated with evolutionary psychology have found common ground with the cognitive rhetoricians. The seminal authorities in cognitive rhetoric are the language philosophers Mark Johnson and George Lakoff
. The most prominent literary theorist in the field is Mark Turner
. Other literary scholars associated with cognitive rhetoric include Mary Thomas Crane, F. Elizabeth Hart, Tony Jackson, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Francis Steen, and Lisa Zunshine.
, professes himself hostile to evolutionary psychology. For a commentary that is sympathetic to evolutionary psychology but skeptical about the possibilities of using it for literary study, see Steven Pinker, "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature," a review of The Literary Animal, Philosophy and Literature 31 (2007): 162-178.
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
that studies literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
in the context of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
by means of natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology: evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
, evolutionary anthropology
Evolutionary anthropology
Evolutionary anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates. Evolutionary anthropology is based in natural science and social science...
, behavioral ecology
Behavioral ecology
Behavioral ecology, or ethoecology, is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior, and the roles of behavior in enabling an animal to adapt to its environment...
, evolutionary developmental psychology
Evolutionary developmental psychology
Evolutionary developmental psychology, , is the application of the basic principles of Darwinian evolution, particularly natural selection, to explain contemporary human development...
, cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, affective neuroscience
Affective neuroscience
Affective neuroscience is the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.-Brain areas related to emotion:...
, behavioural genetics
Behavioural genetics
Quantitative human behavioural genetics is a specialisation in the biological field of behaviour genetics that studies the role of genetics in human behaviour employing quantitative-genetic methods. The field is an overlap of quantitative genetics and psychology...
, evolutionary epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology refers to two distinct topics - on the one hand, the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, and on the other hand, a theory in that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection....
, and other such disciplines.
Scope
Literary Darwinists use concepts from evolutionary biology and the evolutionary human sciences to formulate principles of literary theory and interpret literary texts. They investigate interactions between human natureHuman nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
and the forms of cultural imagination, including literature and its oral antecedents. By “human nature,” they mean a pan-human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition. Because the Darwinists concentrate on relations between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural configurations, they often describe their work as "biocultural critique.”
Darwinian literary studies arose in part as a result of dissatisfaction with the poststructuralist and postmodernist
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
philosophies that came to dominate literary study during the 1970s and 80s. In particular, the Darwinists took issue with the argument that discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
constructs reality. The Darwinists argue that biologically grounded dispositions constrain and inform discourse. This argument runs counter to the central idea in the standard social science model
Standard social science model
The term the Standard Social Science Model was first introduced to a wide audience by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind, to describe the "blank slate," social constructionist,or "cultural determinist" perspective that they claim is the dominant theoretical...
: that culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
wholly constitutes human values and behaviors.
Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study. They rally to Edward O. Wilson’s cry for “consilience” among all the branches of learning. Like Wilson, they envision nature as an integrated set of elements and forces extending in an unbroken chain of material causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest levels of cultural imagination. And like Wilson, they regard evolutionary biology as the pivotal discipline uniting the hard sciences with the social sciences and the humanities. They believe that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment. They argue that for humans, as for all other species, evolution has shaped the anatomical, physiological, and neurological characteristics of the species, and they think that human behavior, feeling, and thought are fundamentally shaped by those characteristics. They make it their business to consult evolutionary biology and evolutionary social science in order to determine what those characteristics are, and they bring that information to bear on their understanding of the products of the human imagination.
In its simplest, crudest forms, evolutionary literary criticism consists only in identifying basic, common human needs—survival, sex, and status, for instance—and using those categories to describe the behavior of characters depicted in literary texts. More ambitious efforts pose for themselves an overarching interpretive challenge: to construct continuous explanatory sequences linking the highest level of causal evolutionary explanation to the most particular effects in individual works of literature. Within evolutionary biology, the highest level of causal explanation involves adaptation by means of natural selection. Starting from the premise that the human mind has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment, literary Darwinists undertake 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 responses of actual readers (for instance, other literary critics), 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.
Contributors to evolutionary studies in literature have included humanists, biologists, and social scientists. Some of the biologists and social scientists have adopted primarily discursive methods for discussing literary subjects, and some of the humanists have adopted the empirical, quantitative methods typical of research in the sciences. Literary scholars and scientists have also collaborated in research that combines the methods typical of work in the humanities with methods typical of work in the sciences.
Adaptive function of literature and the arts
The most hotly debated issue in evolutionary literary study concerns the adaptive functions of literature and other arts—whether there are any adaptive functions, and if so, what they might be. Proposed functions include transmitting information, including about kin relations, and by providing the audience with a model and rehearsal for how to behave in similar situations that may arise in the future. Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works, 1997) suggests that aesthetic responsiveness is merely a side effect of cognitive powers that evolved to fulfill more practical functions, but Pinker also suggests that narratives can provide information for adaptively relevant problems. Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind, 2000) argues that artistic productions in the ancestral environment served as forms of sexual display in order to demonstrate fitness and attract mates, similarly to the function of the peacock’s tail. Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity and help create and maintain human bondingHuman bonding
Human bonding is the process of development of a close, interpersonal relationship. It most commonly takes place between family members or friends, but can also develop among groups such as sporting teams and whenever people spend time together...
. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll
Joseph Carroll (scholar)
Joseph Carroll is a pioneering scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, where he has taught since 1985....
(Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated models of reality. By participating in the simulated life of other people one gains a greater understanding of the motivations of oneself and other people. The idea that the arts function as means of psychological organization subsumes the ideas that the arts provide adaptively relevant information, enable us to consider alternative behavioral scenarios, enhance pattern recognition, and serve as means for creating shared social identity. And of course, the arts can be used for sexual display. In that respect, the arts are like most other human products—clothing, jewelry, shelter, means of transportation, etc. The hypothesis that the arts help organize the mind is not incompatible with the hypothesis of sexual display, but it subordinates sexual display to a more primary adaptive function.
There are also proposed explanations for the structures found in and the differences between different genres. On example being the different features of and gender preferences for pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
and romance novel
Romance novel
The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
s which have been contrasted and explained by sexual selection
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
theories. Another that poetric meter
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
is based on a biologically based three-second metric. Still another is that different genres correspond to different basic emotions with tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
corresponding to the basic emotions of sadness, fear, and anger; comedy with the basic emotions of joy and surprise; and satire with the basic emotions of anger, disgust, and contempt. Another view is that tragedy often discusses the basic evolutionary problem of status conflict while comedy often discusses the similarly basic evolutionary problem of mate selection. The satiric dystopian novel has been described as presenting a conflict between human evolutionary needs and an oppressive state ignoring these.
Distinguishing literary Darwinism
Cosmic Evolutionism and Evolutionary Analogism: Literary Theorists who would call themselves “literary Darwinists” or claim some close alignment with the literary Darwinists share one central idea: that the adapted mind produces literature and that literature reflects the structure and character of the adapted mind. There are at least two other ways of integrating evolution into literary theory: cosmic evolutionism and evolutionary analogism. Cosmic evolutionists identify some universal process of development or progress and identify literary structures as microcosmic versions of that process. Proponents of cosmic evolution include Frederick Turner, Alex Argyros, and Richard Cureton. Evolutionary analogists take the process of Darwinian evolution—blind variation and selective retention—as a widely applicable model for all development. The psychologist Donald Campbell advances the idea that all intellectual creativity can be conceived as a form of random variation and selective retention. Rabkin and Simon offer an instance in literary study. They argue that cultural creations “evolve in the same way as do biological organisms, that is, as complex adaptive systems that succeed or fail according to their fitness to their environment.” Other critics or theorists who have some affiliation with evolutionary biology but who would not identify themselves as literary Darwinists include William Benzon (Beethoven's Anvil) and William Flesch (Comeuppance).Cognitive Rhetoric: Practitioners of "cognitive rhetoric” or cognitive poetics
Cognitive poetics
Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of literary texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism, and is also closely related to stylistics, whose application to literary study...
affiliate themselves with certain language-centered areas of cognitive psychology. The chief theorists in this school argue that language is based in metaphors, and they claim that metaphors are themselves rooted in biology or the body, but they do not argue that human nature consists in a highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Cognitive rhetoricians are generally more anxious than literary Darwinists to associate themselves with postmodern theories of “discourse,” but some cognitive rhetoricians make gestures toward evolutionary psychology, and some critics closely affiliated with evolutionary psychology have found common ground with the cognitive rhetoricians. The seminal authorities in cognitive rhetoric are the language philosophers Mark Johnson and George Lakoff
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
. The most prominent literary theorist in the field is Mark Turner
Mark Turner (cognitive scientist)
Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where he was for two years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences...
. Other literary scholars associated with cognitive rhetoric include Mary Thomas Crane, F. Elizabeth Hart, Tony Jackson, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Francis Steen, and Lisa Zunshine.
Critical commentaries
Some of the commentaries included in the special double issue of Style are critical of literary Darwinism. Other critical commentaries include those of William Benzon, "Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism," (Entelechy: Mind & Culture, Fall 2005/Winter 2006); William Deresiewicz, “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism,” The Nation June 8, 2009: 26-31; William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008); Eugene Goodheart, Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities, (New Brunswick: NJ: Transaction, 2007); Jonathan Kramnick, "Against Literary Darwinism," in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2011; "Debating Literary Darwinism," a set of responses to Jonathan Kramnick's essay, in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2012; and Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004 1-29). Goodheart and Deresiewicz, adopting a traditional humanist perspective, reject efforts to ground literary study in biology. Richardson disavows the Darwinists' tendency to attack poststructuralism. Richardson and Benzon both align themselves with cognitive science and distinguish that alignment from an alignment with evolutionary psychology. Flesch makes use of evolutionary research on game theory, costly signaling, and altruistic punishment but, like Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....
, professes himself hostile to evolutionary psychology. For a commentary that is sympathetic to evolutionary psychology but skeptical about the possibilities of using it for literary study, see Steven Pinker, "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature," a review of The Literary Animal, Philosophy and Literature 31 (2007): 162-178.
See also
- Brian BoydBrian BoydBrian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
- Joseph CarrollJoseph Carroll (scholar)Joseph Carroll is a pioneering scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, where he has taught since 1985....
- Ellen DissanayakeEllen DissanayakeEllen Dissanayake is an independent scholar whose work focuses on the anthropological exploration of art and culture. She is credited for re-defining art as 'making special'; that is, art making involves taking something out of its everyday use and context and making it somehow special.As she...
- Denis DuttonDenis DuttonDenis Dutton was an academic, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand...
- Jonathan GottschallJonathan GottschallJonathan Gottschall is an American literary scholar, the leading younger figure in literature and evolution. He teaches at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania....
- Evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
- Universal DarwinismUniversal darwinismUniversal Darwinism refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth...