Robert Storey

Bio: Robert Storey is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Eudaimonia & Political sociology. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 6 citations.

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Abstract: Nancy Easterlin A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and interpretation Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2012315 pagesWe so-called literary Darwinists-Nancy Easterlin and I count ourselves membershave yet to find a very cozy home among our fellow academics One of the most recent and prominent of responses to our work is an article in Critical Inquiry by Jonathan Kramnick, in which, putatively sobered by the attention it has received, particularly outside the academy, he offers an attempt "to take seriously the central premises of the Darwinian program in literary studies" Predictably, the article, like the response to its critics that appears a year later, is nothing of the kind: it is an attack upon his own caricature of that program-as bad theory hatched from bad science resulting in criticism incapable of saying anything important about literary texts or formsNancy Easterlin's book should change all of this It is, without exception, the best work yet in the field, and represents a high-water mark in literary theory and criticism Easterlin is a committed Darwinian-that is, she accepts the evolutionary scenario as sufficient explanation for the existence of human beings, for their behavior, their thinking, and their handiwork, including literature-but she is also a pluralist who thinks that "biocultural criticism," ideally practiced, would "not employ an a priori model that it presumes has application to the vast majority of literary texts" (34) Her arguments "maintain a philosophically coherent view of human beings while illustrating how different applications of interdisciplinary research can illuminate the human problems" dramatized in literature (34) The research is wide-ranging and sophisticated-encompassing evolutionary, developmental, and cognitive psychology; bioepistemology, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, and more-and the analyses of individual poems, stories, and novels that this research helps illuminate are not only "important" but often dazzling in their complexity, subtlety, and lucid precision Easterlin does not take as her goal a '"move closer to science' by discovering 'an adaptive function that is specific to art or literature proper,"' as Kramnick claims all literary Darwinists do; rather her aim is "to demonstrate to literary specialists that literature may be for many things and that a biocultural approach has broad application across literatures, topics, and subfields" (34) She also does not accept the claim of Joseph Carroll (whom Caleb Crain early anointed the "pope" of literary Darwinism [37]) that "the primary purpose of literary criticism, as an objective pursuit of true knowledge about its subject, is to identify the specific configuration of meaning in any given text or set of texts" (23) Literary meaning, though not "endlessly deferred in any radical sense," can never be recovered "objectively" for Easterlin, since reading is a "dynamic, interpretive," and so inevitably subjective process, "and it is in 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]) to Carroll's pope She asserts, against such "homogenizing" of literary Darwinists as we find in Kramnick, that, "in point of fact, [they] have only one shared assumption: that findings about human psychology and behavior might prove illuminating for the study of human artifacts" (11) The "might" in that sentence dike the "perhaps" in the one that concludes the previous paragraph) suggests the real strengths of Easterlin's approach: she is, although a true believer in an evolved "human nature," modest and cautious in her extrapolations of that belief, generous in her contextualizing of literary texts, framing them not only biologically and culturally, as her title suggests, but also socially, historically, and biographically, and alert always to the fact that literary texts are artful products of human meaningmaking, not (or not always) the musings of a species mulling its eternal concerns, as Carroll and his disciples seem sometimes to interpret them …

Art and Religion: Co-Evolved Phenomena

Abstract: Carroll continues to show his superb mastery of the field here, and I can add little to his summary of the accomplishments, struggles, and schisms that mark that field's progress. Where I might hang a footnote is to his response to that "crucial element of human nature" that "remains at least partially outside [the] consensus model: the disposition for producing and consuming literature and the other arts" (103). Like Carroll, I believe that all the arts have adaptive value; in fact, I would go farther and affirm with Ellen Dissanayake that the arts give evidence in human beings for a "biologically endowed adaptive behavioral proclivity" ('"Making"' 27). I am in complete agreement with Carroll's objections to Pinker's relegation of the arts to pleasure-machines, as well as to Miller's characterization of them as "useless ornaments" (PAGE). His defense is quite strong. But I am uneasy with Carroll's own alternative hypothesis, at least as regards literature, the art that is at the focus of the essay. Here is Carroll's explanation: The adaptive value of high intelligence is that it provides the means for behavioral flexibility, for dealing with contingent circumstances and hypothetical situations. That behavioral flexibility has made of the human species the most successful alpha predator of all time, but achieving dominance in this way has come with a cost. [E.O.] Wilson speaks of the "psychological exile" of the species. . . . The proliferation of possibilities in "mental scenarios" detached from instinct produces a potential chaos in organizing motives and regulating behavior and the elemental passions that derive from human life history. The arts are thus an adaptive response to the adaptive problem produced by theadaptive capacities of high intelligence. The human being of "high intelligence" is no longer a creature of "instinct," true, but I would argue that it is not necessarily prey to "chaos" in its organizing and regulating skills, however numerous the "mental scenarios" it entertains. The "motives," "behavior," and "passions" that Carroll is referring to belong presumably to the human social world ("human life history"), and, for that world, the creature without instincts has evolved a finely tuned system of emotions. That system is more than adequate to the demands of social scenarios of both the immediate moment and the far-flung future, and it makes stabilizingly good sense of the events of both the near and the distant past (if we give, of course, some allowance to the ways egotism always skews the results!). With Wilson, I agree that our species is psychologically exiled, but not, I think, from its once instinctively managed social skills. The nature of that exile will be addressed later in this response. A second point of divergence between Carroll and me is the definition of art, specifically, here, of literary art. I agree strongly that to solve "the puzzle of adaptive function" (121), we must first "define art in a way that identifies what is peculiar and essential to it." But I have difficulty in descrying a definition of Carroll's own in his essay. The closest we seem to come to it is in the remarks that Carroll quotes from the book he has co-authored with Gottschall, Johnson, and Kruger: "Literature and its oral antecedents derive from a uniquely human, species-typical disposition for producing and consuming imaginative verbal constructs." The phrase "imaginative verbal constructs" can embrace much that is not art, of course. Gossip is often quite imaginative, but it is also often rambling, shapeless, tediously tendentious, and dull. We need, to set the stage, a sharper definition of art and a convincing account of the adaptive function that is unique to it. I have found a no more compelling definition than that of Ellen Dissanayake, who has given it elaboration in three books and dozens of articles over the last twenty years or so. Art, she insists, should be linked not exclusively to artifacts but to a specific kind of behavior. …

Annual Bibliography for 2012

Abstract: The annual bibliography of the Keats-Shelley Journal catalogues recent scholarship related to British Romanticism, with emphasis on secondgeneration writers—particularly John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt. The bibliography includes books, chapters in books, book reviews, articles in journals, other bibliographies, dissertations, and editions of Romantic-era literature and historical documents. The listings are compiled primarily from the catalogues of major British and American publishers and from the tables of contents of books and major journals in the field. The first section of the bibliography lists a wide range of scholarly work on Romanticism that might be of interest to the Journal’s readers, while the subsequent sections list items that deal more specifically with the six aforementioned authors. Because the length of the bibliography precludes my annotating every item, only some entries have annotations—primarily books dealing with the second-generation Romantics. The following biblio graphy catalogues scholarship for the year 2012, along with the occasional item that inadvertently may have been excluded from the annual bibliography in previous years or that may have arrived too late for inclusion. While I have made every attempt to keep the bibliography accurate and comprehensive, the occasional error or omission is inevitable. Please send corrections, additions, and citations for upcoming bibliographies to Ben P. Robertson at Troy University

Interpretation for the bodies : bridging the gap

Abstract: Introduction Narratologists and literary scholars have often drawn attention to the problematic role of interpretation within cognitive approaches to narrative and literature (see Jackson; Easterlin 20-27; Ryan). How is it possible to reconcile literary interpretation as a specifically cultural form of meaning-making with the generalizing aims and reductionist methods of the cognitive sciences? This discussion on the scientific status of interpretation goes back at least to Wilhelm Dilthey's distinction between "Erklarung" (causal explanation, the goal of scientific investigation) and "Verstehen" (interpretive understanding as practiced in the human sciences; see Gallagher). "Erklarung" attempts to explain phenomena through scientific methods, in terms of their underlying causes, while "Verstehen" makes sense of human agency and cultural practices by referring to their subjective significance. Focusing on the integration of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, today's theories of "consilience" (Wilson) and "vertical" or "conceptual integration" (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby; Slingerland 9-11) have put the relationship between scientific knowledge and interpretation--"Erklarung" and "Verstehen"--back on the agenda of interdisciplinary research. As Wilson himself suggests, "[!Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts" (230). Interpretation is where the divergences between scientific and humanistic methods are at their most evident, thus representing a crucial test bed for any cognitive approach to cultural artifacts. Evolutionary critics such as Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and Jonathan Gottschall have made a step towards a fully consilient literary criticism,2 but as Nancy Easterlin notes their (and especially Carroll's) "strong appeal for scientific study ultimately [points] in the direction of a very different kind of discipline, one that perhaps locates human nature rather than literature as it primary object of study" (18). As Easterlin puts it, restating Dilthey's opposition, there is no obvious way in which the "unimaginable complexity of interpretation" (20; see also Nordlund) can be subjected to scientific procedures of hypothesis testing and validation. My article takes on board the difficulty of closing the gap between literary interpretation and scientific knowledge and responds to this difficulty by sidestepping it: if the gap cannot be closed, it can at least be bridged--or so I will suggest. Rather than attempting to reduce interpretation to scientific methods or even theories, I would like to explore how these two domains of inquiry are or could be related across the gap: literary interpretation may not sit comfortably with the goals or methods of scientific inquiry, but it still addresses, and can interact with, processes that fall under the purview of the hard sciences. Perhaps zooming in on these processes will reveal something about the structures that underlie the sheer diversity and complexity of interpretation. This article proposes that the notion of embodiment--which lies at the core of the second-generation cognitive sciences (Lakoff and Johnson)--can provide a link between hermeneutics and bio-evolutionary and cognitive levels of analysis. Embodiment is an existential condition, our being tied to biologically finite and phenomenologically conscious bodies. As such, embodiment is an object of constant cultural reinterpretation. But human embodiment is also the result of an evolutionary history and fundamentally shapes any psychological process, from emotional responses to higher-order meaning constructions (Anderson; Gibbs). All in all, embodiment provides an integrative framework in which different levels of analysis can coexist and constrain one another while remaining distinct in their respective aims and methodological tools. I call this framework "embodiment spectrum," and I stress that this spectrum is respectful of epistemological divides as well as of what we may regard as the autonomy of interpretation--its value for its own sake, regardless of its compatibility or commensurability with scientific knowledge. …

Duas metáforas históricas sobre o problema do sentido da ação

Abstract: Two historical metaphors about the problem of action’s meaning This paper describes two broader tendencies about the sociological problem of action’s meaning. They can be better explained using two intuitive metaphors. The first one is “the mind like a computer”, and the second one is “the world like a text”. The paper shows, in a general approach, the basic postulates of each tendency and their main ontological, epistemological and methodological weaknesses. Then, it will show the implicit convergences, illustrated with three main theoretical flaws: dualism, atomism, and holism. The paper stresses the importance of interdisciplinary research, including the so-called biosocial sciences, to override these flaws.

Communion, Not Consilience: Protecting the Future of Interdisciplinary Literary Study

Abstract: Literary Darwinists aspire to be white knights who rescue the humanities. By drawing literary studies under the methodologically and metaphysically naturalistic umbrella of consilience, they aim to transform it into a discipline that marks progress by accumulation of knowledge. This essay explains how this scientistic agenda works against the new interdisciplinary energy between the sciences and humanities. Instead of consilience, literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary work with the sciences would be far better served by Gadamer’s account of the structure of human experience as that which progresses by way of a transformative communion between the I and the Thou.