Showing papers in "Style in 2008"

An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study

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

Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader

Abstract: Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective reading and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea that we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others and a corollary craving for the kind of narrative action that catalyzes this reading of minds. In this essay, I wish to supplement this research with a focus on fictional minds that cannot be read, not only by characters in the storyworld but also by readers in the actual world. That they exist at all is a conundrum--if, that is, these scholars are right about the role of readable minds in arousing narrative desire, and I think they are. We tend to "naturalize" what is unreadable, mentally domesticating it either by drawing on pre-existing literary forms (Culler 134-60) or by drawing on the larger range of our "real-world experience" (Fludernik 31-5 et passim). I'll discuss in this essay ways in which unreadable minds are commonly naturalized or elided, but my position with regard to the examples I introduce is that they work best when we allow ourselves to rest in that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that is aroused when an unreadable mind is accepted as unreadable. In this regard, my stance is at odds with efforts to make sense of the unreadable, as, for example, Jan Alber's forthcoming effort to develop "sense-making strategies" for the "impossible storyworlds" of postmodern fiction--in effect, to make the unreadable "readable." I should note at the outset that the inability to read minds can enter realistic fiction as a pathology. In Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine refers to fictional representations of autism or "mindblindness" (Baron-Cohen Mindblindness). Citing the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Zunshine notes that the narration in consequence "is mostly lacking in attribution of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes," though "we, the readers, supply those missing mental states, thus making sense of the story" (12). Sociopaths belong to another type that suffers (perhaps the wrong word) an emotional deficit, which not only robs them of a full emotional life but also robs them of the capacity to understand that life as it is lived by others. To do so requires an effort of triangulation that operates the way Dr. Van Helsing describes the mindblindness of Dracula, whose powerful "great brain" is yet a "child-brain ... that do only work selfish and therefore small" (Stoker 363). In his recent novel Talk Talk, T. C. Boyle brilliantly renders a sociopath who is similarly hobbled and consequently incapable of understanding the tenacity of the pair of lovers who pursue him} In The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen controversially extended his early work on autism to include a calibrated range of mindblindness down into the "normal" masculine demographic. If he is right about this, both Othello and Lear might qualify for a diagnosis of mindblindness. And certainly much comedy has turned on the blindness of men to What Every Woman Knows (to cite the 1934 film starring Helen Hayes), that is, not only the minds of others but their own minds as well. But my subject is the mind that defies all efforts to read it. The usual default reading of such a mind is as one or another opaque stereotype, of which the most common is that the character is crazy. It is important to acknowledge here that authors may, and often do, create characters according to stereotypes that are meant to be fully readable as such. Authors also quite commonly create characters who appear to be unreadable, and in consequence are stereotyped by others, yet who acquire readability over the course of the narrative. Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now has "very obviously ... gone insane," according to the film's unnamed general. In context, "insane" is a place-holder for the inexplicable, though here, as often, it works as a performative, that is, as an act of naming with a practical purpose. …

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer

Abstract: The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. By Jonathan Gottschall. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2008. xii, and 223 pp. $34.99 paper. I. This double issue of Style seems an especially appropriate place to review Jonathan Gottschall's new book. Almost as a retort to some of the respondents in this issue who demand what could be called a variation of "show me the money," Gottschall employs adaptationist thinking to investigate what are perhaps the most widely discussed literary works in western culture: Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gottschall's book started out about ten years ago as a dissertation under the direction of the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who has since founded the exciting interdisciplinary program in the evolutionary studies of the humanities and sciences (EvoS) at SUNY Binghamton, and if even only some of their graduates produce books as interesting as the one under review, then both they and we may look forward to some fascinating times ahead. Gottschall quotes the Homeric scholar, John Myres, as "savoring his understatement [that it] is not easy to say anything new about Homer ... after more than 2,500 years" (2), but the former continues by suggesting that, if it is to be done, the novelty must come from one of two places: "discoveries of new evidence, or applications of new perspectives" (10). The Rape of Troy is one of the latter, and "analyzes Homeric conflict from the perspective of modern anthropology and evolutionary biology; it is best described as an evolutionary anthropology of conflict in Homeric society" (3). In his account, "Homeric society" "refers not so much to Homer's fictional construction as to a specific scholarly reconstruction of the real world from which the epics emerged" (3; emphasis in the original). Summarily stated, The Rape of Troy (RT) begins by noting how close to "sudden violent" death Homeric men (and women) habitually lived during what Gottschall calls the "Late Dark Age" of Homeric society (11), the period of time following the collapse of Mycenaean culture in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, or roughly between 800 and 650 BC (22). His arguments comprise three major issues: I) The "patterns of conflict in Homeric society converge beautifully with those described by anthropologists and ethnographers across a strikingly diverse spectrum of non-state societies" of the kind typically found in the "small, poor villages" of the Dark Age Greeks (3, 23). For Gottshall, "all forms of Homeric conflict result from direct attempts, as in fights over women, or indirect attempts, as in fights for status and wealth, to enhance Darwinian fitness in a physically and socially exacting ecological niche" (3). II. His second argument states that "patterns of violence in Homeric society are tantalizing consistent with the hypothesis that Homeric society suffered from an acute shortage of available young women relative to young men. The institution of slave-concubinage meant that women were not equally distributed across the circum-Aegean world [but were] concentrated in certain communities" and often within the "households of powerful men" (4). Later in the book, Gottschall supports this claim by pointing to some basic biological facts: males have "small, cheap sperm" in contrast to females' "large, nutritious, and expensive eggs," and the consequence of this imbalance for sexually reproducing species is the "fundamental shortage of female reproductive capacity relative to male demand" (44-5) under any circumstances. When the absolute number of females generally is held artificially low, the "value" of a female's reproductive capacity thereby "rachets up ... [as does the] costs that males are willing to "pay" for access to it, measured in the currency of risky competition and/or other costly physical and behavioral traits" (45). …

Apriorism for Empiricists

Abstract: When Joseph Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory appeared in 1995, I read the first hundred pages or so with great interest and took comfort from its critique of the then poststructuralist-dominated literary academy Carroll's presentation stood out for its comprehensiveness and its uncompromising embrace of empirical values-the same values to which, since 1980, I myself had been appealing against applied deconstruction and its ideologized progeny62 In addition, I found that Carroll and I shared an intellectual hero, Charles Darwin, who, for both of us, epitomized a determination to explain observed effects only by reference to commonly ascertainable, temporally prior facts and factors, without appeal to "final causes" and other such remnants of an exhausted supernaturalism I had no quarrel in 1995, and I have none now, with the central role that Carroll assigned to Darwin's theory of evolution for an explanatory overview of our species As I have recently stated, "Only a secular Darwinian perspective can make general sense of humankind and its works"63 But whether that perspective ought to become the guiding philosophy of academic literary studies is a different matter That proposition struck me as lame when I first encountered it, and the reasons now assembled by Carroll in its behalf haven't caused me to change my opinion Carroll's program is truly grand in intended scale The literary Darwinians, he writes, "aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted" Their goal is to "subsume all other possible approaches" to the field And if they succeed, that field's current 'disrepute in empirical circles will give way to admiration By responsibly connecting literary analysis to reliable knowledge about human nature and by making their own scrupulous additions to such knowledge, critics will contribute to E O Wilson's consilience, helping to chart "an unbroken chain of material causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest levels of cultural imagination"64 In demurring from Carroll's initiative, I do not mean to reject the realm of theorizing to which his program appeals (sometimes rather sheepishly) for its scientific backbone, evolutionary psychology To be sure, that subdiscipline has been plagued by a scarcity of hard evidence that might substantiate one "Just-so Story" about emergent dispositions at the expense of rival hypotheses But this drawback may be mitigated someday by new sources of information, and meanwhile there is much to be learned about cross-cultural regularities that are suggestive of biological roots and adaptive functions in a broadly Darwinian sense That is why I agreed to contribute an encouraging foreword to one of the cultural evolutionists' most promising books, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson's anthology The Literary Animal The chapters of that volume, along with most of the other studies that Carroll now marshals as evidence of an incipient intellectual revolution, are interdisciplinary efforts Examining literary productions, from myths and fairy tales through Shakespeare plays, they uncover motifs and narratological patterns pointing to traits of general human nature The results belong to aesthetics, psychology, and anthropology, but not, as Carroll acknowledges, to literary criticism, because the goal here is data extraction and replicable social-scientific knowledge rather than identification and explanation of the features that set a given work apart from others Nevertheless, Carroll doesn't hesitate to claim that critical analysis per se also ought to take an explicitly Darwinian turn Criticism, he holds, now suffers from a "blank slate" neglect of biological and behavioral universals - a neglect fostered on one side by impressionistic, idealizing, sentimentalizing humanists and on another by poststructuralist obfuscators and ideologues A Darwinian outlook, in contrast, keeps a steady eye on "the urgent needs and driving forces in life survival, reproduction, kinship, social affiliation, dominance, aggression, and the needs of the imagination …

James Phelan. Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

Abstract: James Phelan Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007 249 pp $7495 cloth; $2495 paper; $995 CD In a famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953), Isaiah Berlin muses on the remark of the Greek poet Archilochus that, while the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing More recently, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox (2004) The remark is gnomic enough to be capable of different interpretations What it suggests to me is a continuum in which, at the fox end of the scale, can be found those scholars who, within a particular field such as narratology, are able to turn their hands to a number of different issues and achieve a broad mastery over the whole area At the hedgehog end are those who are content to plough a deep furrow, and pursue a single issue It is then possible to discern a logic or a thread that ties all of the work of hedgehog scholars together and gives their books and essays a satisfying sense of coherence Most people, of course, are in the middle of the spectrum, combining particular interests with a broad knowledge It seems to me that James Phelan is a hedgehog (I am disregarding here his commendably fox-like editorship of Narrative) And his one big thing is his "ongoing effort to write a comprehensive account of the rhetorical theory of narrative" According to Phelan, this new book is the fifth chapter in his attempt to do so The first chapter, Worlds from Words, was "a study of style"; Reading People, Reading Plots "a study of character and narrative progression"; Narrative as Rhetoric an articulation of the general theory and an illustration of how it would solve a number of interpretive problems; and Living to Tell about It 'a study of character narration that also develops a more systematic approach to rhetorical ethics' (xiii) Referring to his books as chapters shows that Phelan has a clear sense of his own scholarly narrative and of the place that this new book has in it Indeed, as further evidence of his single-mindedness and consistency of purpose, Phelan also explains that his new book arose out of a question asked more than thirty years ago by Sheldon Sacks: "Do we read the same books?" (This question has been reformulated by Phelan as: "Can we experience the same books in similar ways?") Phelan then proceeds in his characteristically systematic, indeed Aristotelian, way to develop his theory of narrative judgements He argues that readers' judgments about characters and tellers are crucial to their experience of narrative form Narrative judgments (interpretive, ethical and aesthetic) are the point of intersection for narrative form, narrative ethics, and narrative aesthetics These judgments are distinct and not fully dependent on each other, but significantly influence each other As individual narratives establish their own ethical and aesthetic standards, narrative judgments proceed from the inside out, rather than the outside in Readers experience narrative form through narrative progression, which is the synthesis of textual and readerly dynamics Within the study of narrative progression, the following elements may be identified: beginnings may consist of exposition, launch, initiation, and entrance; middles of exposition, voyage, interaction, and intermediate configuration; and endings of exposition/ closure, arrival, farewell, and completion However, Phelan emphasizes that this model is "not designed to predict (or prescribe) how progressions must proceed but rather to give us tools for unpacking how they have proceeded" (15) He illustrates this framework with some familiar texts that have a high degree of narrativity: he considers the beginnings, middles and endings of Austen's Persuasion, Morrison's Beloved, McEwan's Atonement and Wharton's "Roman Fever …

Do We Need Literary Darwinism

Abstract: In his essay, "The Sleep of Reason" the philosopher Thomas Nagel remarks: "[Postmodernism] may be on the way out, but I suspect that there will continue to be a market in the huge American academy for a quick fix of some kind. If it is not social constructionism, it will be something else - Darwinian explanations of practically everything else" (Patai and Corral 552). Now associated with extraordinary advances in genetics, Darwinism promises a scientific understanding of any and all disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Think of postmodern skepticism about words like "truth" and "reality." The neo- Darwinian approach removes the quotation marks that surround them. As I say in my book, Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities, "I would be less than candid not to acknowledge that the present condition in the humanities (its self- doubt and disarray) is a kind of invitation to the neo-Darwinists" ( I ). E. O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, draws the following contrast between the Enlightenment tradition in which he places himself and postmodernism. "Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis to the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes could be explained as follows. Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing" (Consilience 44). This is a debatable formulation, but it does reveal the mindset of the neo-Darwinian approach. In his book Consilience, Wilson has no less an ambition than to unify all the disciplines on the basis of biology. The ultimate ambition of literary Darwinism, as Joseph Carroll makes clear very much in the Wilsonian spirit, is "to fundamentally [alter] the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted" and "to subsume all other possible approaches to literary study." Historical, aesthetic, sociological, rhetorical perspectives are to be incorporated into a predominantly biological approach to literature. Though Carroll acknowledges that theoretical approaches other than literary Darwinism have provided insights into literature, he sees them as all flawed, requiring their rescue by evolutionary psychology. The chutzpah is breathtaking, given the absence of anything approaching a theory of literature in the paradigm he presents. Can evolutionary psychology say anything interesting about literature? My answer is that it is possible, that I am not a prophet and can't predict the future. On the basis of what I've read up to now, I must confess that I am a skeptic. Both the general understanding of literature and the interpretations of individual works are crudely reductionist. Reductionism in the natural sciences is no vice; on the contrary, it enables one discipline (for instance, physics) to explain another (chemistry). In the humanities, however, it subverts the uniqueness and complexity of works of art. Carroll' s complaint about "traditional humanist criticism," (which I exemplify in his essay) is that lacking in empirical curiosity, it "operates on the level of the author's lexicon and seeks no systematic reduction to simple principles that have large general validity" (Literary Darwinism 213). Well, this hardly seems a deficiency. The alternative that Carroll and his fellow literary Darwinists propose is the dissolution of the individuality of a work (the very reason that we enjoy and value it) into large generalizations that remove all of its distinctive features and vitality. Here are some samples, striking in their banality: "Humans are bipedal, but proportional to body size they have much larger brains than other primates.... Human beings are heavily dependent on parental care for much longer than other animals. . .Parents and children share a fitness interest in the success of the child in the child reaching maturity and achieving successful reproduction... Human beings are physically discrete. Individual persons are bodies wrapped in skin with nervous systems to brains that are soaked in blood and encased in bone. …

Art as Adaptation: A Challenge

Abstract: Joseph Carroll knows literary Darwinism not only through breaking in the field but also from helping so many newcomers over the fence, myself included I agree with almost everything he writes in the bulk of the article, but since we learn more from disagreement, I will take issue with one section, The Adaptive Function of Literature Carroll's account of my own proposal seems to me inaccurate, and his own proposal seriously wanting I have proposed that art is a human adaptation deriving from play, a widespread animal behavior45 Play evolved through the advantages of flexibility, of behavior not fully programmed genetically; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense and social give-and-take can make life-or-death differences Creatures with more motivation to practice such behaviors in situations of low urgency on average fare better at moments of high urgency Animals that play repeatedly and exuberantly hone skills, widen repertoires and sharpen sensitivities Play therefore has evolved to be highly self-rewarding Because it is compulsive, animals engage in it again and again, incrementally altering muscle tone and neural wiring, strengthening and speeding up synaptic pathways, improving their capacity and performance Humans uniquely inhabit "the cognitive niche" (Tooby and De Vore) We therefore have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays that allow rich inferences Like other species, humans can assimilate information through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape and share information in open-ended ways We actively pursue the patterns that make data swiftly intelligible, especially those yielding the richest inferences in our core information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and our most crucial domain, social information Art is a kind of cognitive play with pattern Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art serves as a playground in which the mind increases cognitive skills, repertoires and sensitivities Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more focused our attention and the more frequent and intense our response the more powerful the neural consequences46 Art's appeal to our preferences for pattern means that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough so that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways Other functions follow from this Individuals who can earn the attention of others through art gain in status Emotional attunement in cognitively appealing forms improves social cohesion, as does the creation of engaging prosocial models Fiction can create scenarios for reasoning about action in ways that earn attention, emotion and recall Art can be appropriated by religion, to intensify traditions and social commitments, but it can also foster creativity, especially in large communities with high specialization of labor Carroll critiques creativity as if it were the prime function I propose for art, when in my account it comes in fifth, and explicitly only because the other functions are already in place I find it hard to understand Carroll's proposal, so let me quote what I take to be his core claims: art organiz[es] motivational systems disconnected from the immediate promptings of instinct The proliferation of possibilities in 'mental scenarios' detached from instinct produces a potential chaos in organizing motives and regulating behavior The arts produce images of the world and of our experience of the world Those images mediate our behavior and the elemental passions that derive from human life history Carroll rests much of his case on an appeal to the authority of E …

Good and Bad Reductionism: Acknowledging the Power of Culture

Abstract: As someone who has written at length on the need for vertical integration or consilience between the natural sciences and the humanities, I am obviously in agreement with the majority of Carroll's argument I particularly mink it is important to recognize, as Carroll notes, that any work in academia worth its salt is "reductive" in some respect - that is, seeks to explain a particular phenomenon in terms of more basic, general principles The common tendency in the humanities to use "reductionistic" as a peremptory term of dismissal is therefore entirely unjustified I do think, however, that it is important to distinguish between "good" and "bad" forms of reductionism, and to make it clear that consilience, properly understood, involves an ongoing respect for the relative autonomy of the levels of explanation studied by the humanities I do not think that this is something with which Carroll would disagree, but at points in his essay his rhetoric suggests otherwise If those of us who support evolutionary approaches to the humanities wish to win broader acceptance among our colleagues, it is incumbent upon us to make it clear that consilience does not entail - as many humanists fear it does collapsing humanities departments into biology departments, denying the significance of human-level truths, or reducing human culture to a mechanistically-expressed phenotypic trait Carroll notes the existence of a group of scholars interested in cognitive approaches to literature who nonetheless seem determined to distance themselves from literary Darwinism This is, on the face of it, rather puzzling: the human cognitive system is a product of evolution, so it is hard to imagine why someone interested in human cognition would have an allergy to evolutionary theory No doubt some of this leeriness results from a visceral aversion liberal intellectuals tend to exhibit toward any mention of Darwinism or evolution: in my experience, the leap from "Darwinism" to "Nazism" or "eugenics" is an almost Pavlovian response for most humanists, and it takes some work to overcome this indefensible and intellectually lazy response In addition, as I have argued elsewhere, a powerful source of resistance to applying evolutionary theory to human beings is our innate mind-body dualism (a product of our Theory of Mind): we are comfortable talking about non-human animal behavior or "merely physical" aspects of human beings (our organs, our limbs) in evolutionary terms, but the mind and its products strike us as being qualitatively different in some way In this sense, it could be said that we are built by evolution to have trouble believing in evolution as a universal explanatory framework The combination of our innate resistance to physicalism and the historically-conditioned kneejerk reaction against Darwin means that any attempt to advance literary Darwinism is going to be an uphill battle One way to make progress in this battle is to make it clear that vertical integration does not entail eliminative or "greedy" reductionism, whereby the heuristic importance and relative autonomy of higher-level entities is denied A glance at the natural sciences allows us to get a good grasp of what "good" reductionism looks like Neuroscience is dependent upon organic chemistry, which in turn is dependent upon physical chemistry, which in turn is dependent on physics The nature of this dependence is such that lower levels of explanation exert an important constraining function on the higher levels A hypothesis in organic chemistry that violates everything that we think we know about physical chemistry is likely to be rejected out of hand; if not, it would require a complete rethinking of physical chemistry The argument behind vertical integration is that the levels of explanation studies by the humanities need to be plugged into their proper place at the top of this hierarchy of explanation, and be subjected to the same constraint of overall "consilience …

Dirimens Copulatio and Metalinguistic Negation in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: In response to a question about Sherwood Anderson's style, William Faulkner described writing as "a matter of imagining any number of things. The writer at the moment of putting it down has got to be a censor, to say Now, this is right, this is wrong, and to throw away the wrong" (Faulkner 229). According to Faulkner, Anderson did not follow this mandate, yet to his style the concomitant "fumbling and clumsiness" were essential. Faulkner may have inherited something from his old mentor in New Orleans, for although Faulkner's own writing style is decidedly more complex than Anderson's, its very complexity, the lengthy adjectival and adverbial clauses that endlessly refine their subjects, also seems to violate this rule of self-censorship, of keeping the right and discarding the wrong. What might be just a stylistic and rhetorical tendency in Faulkner's prose is raised to a formative structural principle in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). For a novel ostensibly obsessed with the recovery of history, its narrators contradict each other and themselves, couch their narratives in negative and conjectural terms, and cast upon each version of Thomas Sutpen's history an essential indeterminacy. Absalom's characteristic uses of rhetorical negative clauses give the impression of throwing wrong narrative possibilities away; it is through these performed instances of negative supposition, however, that the narrative voice betrays its reluctance to purge the imaginary or suppositional and, in bifurcation, releases its claim to certainty. Critical reading and interpretative practices in Faulkner criticism, as well as in literary criticism in general, have turned away from poetics and toward questions of history, culture, and power. Andre Bleikasten identifies this moment, as it pertains to Absalom criticism, as the publication of Eric Sundquist's "Absalom, Absalom! and the House Divided" in 1983. Bleikasten complains, "Faulkner's importance, [Sundquist] argued, is not to be sought in his contribution to the art of the novel but in the seriousness with which he addresses social and historical themes.... Nearly all recent Faulkner criticism starts from similar premises" (206-07). Depending on how accurately this claim describes the current state of Absalom criticism, my own study would appear to be obsolete, in dialogue with critics who regard Faulkner's literary style as constructive of aesthetic effect. My hope, however, is to show how formalist questions can illuminate the dynamics of the social and political registers which have made Faulkner so appealing to New Americanist criticism of the past two decades. This essay locates the nexus of Absalom's swarming narratives in negative and collaborative narration. An investigation into the poetics of negative narration at the syntactic level will yield a model for the narrative strategy--the rhetorical figure dirimens copulatio--deployed in the larger compositional structure of the novel itself. In brief, I suggest that Absalom's narrative structure--the successive attempts to tell Thomas Sutpen's story that continually "one-up" each other by negating and amending the story immediately prior--adopts the same formal logic as that of the rhetorical figure "it was not x, but y" (dirimens copulatio). Drawing attention to the metalinguistic and temporal elements of that figure, this essay provides a way to understand the formal interrelation between the novel's conflicting accounts of Sutpen. Such an understanding of Absalom can account for both rhetorical and political approaches to the novel. Whereas this study begins from structural analyses of syntax and discourse, it finds that the new categories, like metalinguistic negation, needed to explain the narrative logic on a rhetorical level are the same ones that on a theoretical level define the novel's racial, legal, sexual, and political ontologies of identity. This essay may not give the final word to the questions of race, class, gender and law that have made the novel so successful in politically-oriented and identity-sensitive literary criticism, nor may it exhaust the endless debate over Faulkner's style that makes his writing so frequently the subject of rhetorical and linguistic analyses. …

The Centrality of the Exceptional in Literary Study

Abstract: I am confused about Joseph Carroll's "we." Citing his own earlier work, Carroll notes that he once admitted that "we do not yet have a full and adequate conception of human nature." This we may be no more than a variation of "one"--anyone. But then I read that, time having passed, Carroll himself is now able to "lay out a model of human nature that incorporates the features on which most practitioners in the field would agree." He does this in 1600 words. Does he consider himself one of the community of "practitioners?" Or are they the community of scientists and social scientists who are trained in those fields? If the second, and that seems more likely, by what authority does he ask us to accept as accurate or useful his summary of a field that is neither his nor ours? Beyond my general ability to follow rational argument, how can I evaluate the claims made therein? The most surprising is the claim that he reports finding a "consensus" model. Am I being asked to believe that although my own academic area of literary theory is cross-hatched by contested claims, the field of evolution and evolutionary psychology is blissfully free of conflict and competition? Especially when it comes to a model (of all things!) of human nature? I am being asked to believe in Tinkerbell. Speaking as one who is quite interested in the scientific fields of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, I must protest that it is entirely unreasonable for literary scholars to be asked to build their own work on a homogenized summary of a field they are not trained to critique, in which they are not trained to recognize overgeneralizations from data, to spot weak or faulty research assumptions, to notice the lack of or poorly defined control groups, or the misplaced use of statistical models. It is, indeed, ridiculous for literary scholars to include themselves within the "we" who now "have a model of human nature," since, as even an amateur reading of the weekly New York Times science page repeatedly demonstrates, claims about the universals of human nature remain well beyond consensus. While I leave it to others to point out how much of Carroll's "model" consists of unproven, even unprovable hypotheses, most still actively in dispute, Carroll knows perfectly well that his summary is inadequate for any purpose beyond piquing the interest of the uninformed. He acknowledges this by providing an example of a "professional" use of these scientific fields for the study of literature, the work of Brian Boyd, whom he praises for "expertise in assimilating information from the social sciences;" Boyd, we are meant to understand, does his homework. With "explicit and detailed reference to evolutionary social science, Boyd demonstrates that the findings of cognitive psychology make sense ultimately because they are embedded in the findings of evolutionary psychology." To be professional, on this view, is to "assimilate" (which I take to mean accept and adopt) the claims of two fields in which you are not trained to be a critical reader! And Carroll hasn't even had time to mention the exciting developments in systems biology, clearly relevant as a third field underpinning whatever ultimately emerges as a description of human nature, but also a field in which competing hypotheses are vigorously argued. I was about to submit, then, as my first complaint, that Carroll is asking us to adopt as guiding principles his versions of what two or three scientific fields are about, ignoring the quite reasonable and normal controversy within them about both basic principles and about details. We must do this, I infer, even though we as literary scholars have none of the training that would be needed for us to make properly critical use of their conclusions, because this is the way we will be able to generate "new" knowledge about literature. I am stopped from advancing this criticism, however, because just as he asks us to make this commitment, Carroll notes that there is "one crucial element of human nature [that] remains at least partially outside this consensus model and that is 'the disposition for producing and consuming literature and the other arts. …

Point of View: In Teaching Composition, 'Formulaic' Is Not a Four-Letter Word *

Abstract: One of the least-examined assumptions among academics today is that being "formulaic" - using established formulas to structure thought - is always a bad thing In the field of rhetoric and composition, to say that a mode of writing instruction is formulaic is to charge it with having a "cookie cutter" quality: the student writer presumably inserts raw material into a mold, and the product automatically comes out, no thought required That is the charge commonly leveled against the five-paragraph essay that has long been a dominant model for high-school writing Specifically, it is said that the five-paragraph formula forces students to conform to a mechanical routine that chokes the life out of writing, encouraging them not to wrestle with ideas but to conform to a one-size-fits-all straitjacket Dennis Baron, a linguist and English professor, complains that the SAT's "formulaic approach will reverse decades of progress in literacy instruction and ultimately turn students into intellectual automatons" Like many academics, Baron uses "formulaic" pejoratively, as if the word always merits an eye-rolling grimace There are several problems with this formulaphobia For one thing, not all formulas function in the same deadening way Furthermore, the idea that formulas in themselves are bad - or that we could possibly communicate in some formulafree way - is mistaken Formulas, less invidiously called conventions, pervade everything we do Try writing a sonnet, doing the cha-cha, saying "Hi, how are you?" or "I love you," or even questioning the value of formulas without relying on established forms that you didn't invent Far from shutting down thought and stifling creativity, formulas structure thought and feeling and make creativity possible Most important, if we try to reject formulas altogether, we forfeit a valuable tool for clarifying academic mysteries to large numbers of students The proper antidote to the five-paragraph formula is not to reject formulas as such, but to look for ones that more closely capture the way critical thinking really operates The reason the five-paragraph essay has survived as long as it has, we suspect, is that it gives students who need it a series of clear operations to perform: offer an introductory claim followed by three supporting paragraphs and then a conclusion that restates and deepens the claim The downside of this thesis/evidence formula, however, is that it has the student perform those important maneuvers in an isolation booth, without engaging other people Thus it bypasses one of the most important rhetorical requirements: that we enter the social fray, presenting what others have said not as an afterthought or as mere support for our own argument, but as our argument's motivating source, its very reason for being The problem with the five-paragraph essay, then, is not that it is a cookie cutter, but that it is the wrong type of cookie cutter; the cookies you make with it won't be your best What critics of the five-paragraph model should be objecting to is not that it is a formula, but that it is a weak formula, one that produces arguments that are disengaged and decontextualized, severed from any social mission or context Here, we suspect, is what Baron really finds troubling - and he may be right - in the new SAT writing test: not that it's formulaic, but that it's deadeningly asocial and results in a monologue A far more engaged writing formula can be found in the work of the composition theorist David Bartholomae, who recalls a professor of his suggesting that, when stuck in his writing, he use the following "machine": While most readers of ____ have said ____ , a close and careful reading shows that ____ Similarly, the composition specialist Irene Clark, drawing on the work of John Swales, Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and others, asks graduate thesis and dissertation writers to fill in these blanks: My thesis will address the following question: ____ …

Literary Darwinism as Science and Myth

Abstract: The program of Darwinian literary study (DLS) that Joseph Carroll advances in "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study" encompasses a number of projects whose relationships are unclear, whose ambitions are unrealizable, and whose interpretive power is weak However, the most disturbing aspect of the project is that it depends on misunderstanding the nature of literary study Literary study is not now, and never has been, a progressive science whose aim is "generating new knowledge" in the form of scientific theories; its purpose is to carry on a literary tradition, whose remoteness, of one kind or another, presents a barrier to that aim The study of Latin and Greek literature is the model Literary study establishes texts, tries to determine meanings in historical context, and produces narratives based on those meanings The purpose of literary study is the transmission, transformation, and even creation of literary traditions - think of F O Matthiessen's American Renaissance Literary study is not "about" those traditions, it is a constitutive part of the them The scholar thus has a very different relationship to literary works than a scientist has to nature The latter offers causal explanations rather than interpretations and narratives Literary scholarship is an enterprise that has long done its work more or less well, and the current danger to the field is not the absence of a unifying scientific theory but the replacement of classic literary works and major traditions with "cultural texts" that may not even be literature at all The crisis in literary study that Jonathan Gottschall traces to "a methodological failure to produce empirically valid and progressive forms of knowledge" (quoted by Carroll) is, in fact, a minor part of the tradition of literary study itself When vernacular literatures were introduced to the curriculum of research universities in the late nineteenth century they had to overcome the objection that literature in one's native language, unlike the classics, did not require disciplinary study Since vernacular works were addressed to and readily understood by educated adults, what would one be tested on - one's taste? To counter these objections the literary scholars introduced and made central to the discipline the history of modern languages, which yielded "laws," and Anglo-Saxon As F W Bateson says: "When we came into being some seventy years ago the superimposition of Eng Lang, on Eng Lit was tactically necessary to meet the objection that Eng Lit per se would be a 'soft option'" (222) The worry that motivated this initial defensive effort has been felt ever since, and it is science that has usually been called to the rescue In 1893 Richard Green Moulton published Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist; a Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism, and New Criticism was based, in part, on the linguistic theories of Russian Formalism Psychoanalytic theories, Marxism, structural linguistics and other alleged or actual sciences have also been used to make scientific claims for literary study The case for making it a science was made most forcefully by Northrop Frye in the "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism, and Frye offered his own archetypal theory Three decades later Jonathan Culler said that structuralist literary theory was an attempt to "revitalize criticism and free it from an exclusively interpretive role[by] developing a programme which would justify it as a mode of knowledge" (viii) Nothing like a science of literature emerged from these efforts, and DLS will, I believe, meet the same fate as earlier efforts to make literary study a science What, then, is DLS? Consider Carroll's claim that DLS has "social science, connecting local critical perceptions with general principles of literary theory, and integrating these principles with principles of psychology, linguistics, and anthropology" (129-130) …

Information Is the Stuff of Narrative

Abstract: Implicit in all evolutionary hypotheses regarding the function of narrative is the assumption that stories transmit information. Despite this, Carroll argues that narrative is not "didactic" in function. The essence of his position is as follows: "The idea of art as a source of information or exemplary lessons in conduct has some merit, but information can be delivered in other ways more efficiently, and didacticism, like novelty, leaves out too much of what is peculiar and specific to art, while also excluding too many instances of art that could not plausibly be described as didactic." Webster's dictionary defines didactic as "intended to convey instruction and information." Storytelling clearly fits this definition: it conveys information and, as a communicative act, it is intentional (Sperber and Wilson). An inescapable conclusion follows: there are no instances of storytelling that are not didactic. Thus, the argument against "didacticism" is largely semantic. For example, Carroll argues that "the arts fulfill a vital adaptive function" by creating "an imaginative universe in which the forces at work in the environment and inside the mind are brought into emotionally meaningful relations to one another." He adds that this "is not the same thing as providing practically useful information or an objectively accurate map of the external environment." However, if the arts bring "the forces at work in the environment and inside the mind into emotionally meaningful relations to one another" (italics added), then the arts provide "practically useful information" about "the external environment." Meaning is information, and information that is "vital" is both practical and useful. Moreover, information need not be objective to be accurate or useful; it need only be reliable. If information provided by imaginative universes did not reliably correspond to the external environment, the arts could not "fulfill a vital adaptive function." The evaluative criteria that Carroll presents in an earlier essay are grounded on just such a correspondence between the external environment and imaginative universes: he critiques Kurten's and Auel's respective depictions of Neanderthals for being inconsistent with archaeological evidence, arguing that "in fiction the rules of evidence and logic do count. They are important elements in the integrity of conception in the representation of the subject" (Literary Darwinism 173). The conversation about didacticism is really a conversation about design, as evinced by Carroll's claim that didacticism "leaves out too much of what is peculiar and specific to art." He is referring here to the subjective, emotional, aesthetic, and qualitative aspects of art. I believe that conceptualizing narrative as a system for transmitting adaptively useful information includes all of these qualities. The remainder of mis response will address diese aspects of narrative design with respect to what Carroll calls didacticism and what I call the information transmission hypothesis (Scalise Sugiyama "Narrative as Social Mapping"). It should be noted that Carroll's paradigm embraces both art and narrative, whereas my hypothesis refers exclusively to narrative. There is no substantive conflict between Carroll's claim that literature "produces subjectively modulated images of the world and of our experience in the world" and my claim that narrative is a system for storing and transmitting adaptively useful information by simulating the human environment. AU information transmitted from one human to another is "subjectively modulated" in that it is filtered first through the transmitter's and then through the receiver's fitness interests, abilities, and experience (for example, beliefs, desires, feelings). Hence, it goes without saying that any adaptively useful information acquired through communication with a conspecific is also subjective. Storytelling is triply so: ( 1 ) story content is inherently biased by the priorities and prejudices of the storyteller (Scalise Sugiyama, "On the Origins"); (2) each character embodies a unique set of abilities, goals, and perspectives through which he/she views the world (Scalise Sugiyama "Feminine Nature"); and (3) La Jalousie notwithstanding, narrative gives us (subjectively modulated) access to the minds of others (Scalise Sugiyama, "Feminine Nature"). …

Evolution and Paradigms in the Study of Literature

Abstract: Joseph Carroll is a leader in the movement to bring evolutionary analysis into the humanities and literary criticism in particular. Not only did he write the first major monograph in this area (Evolution and Literary Theory), but he has immersed himself in the original writings of Charles Darwin and edited a volume of his major writings. Indeed, he has avoided the sometimes bowdlerized and narrow takes of many evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, and sociobiologists to evolution and Darwin himself. In this target article, the depth of Carroll's understanding and familiarity with the biological areas of psychology combined with his inclusion of recent scholarly contributions to literary and broadly humanistic applications of evolutionary approaches, both pro and con, is very impressive. Some Problems with Evolutionary Psychology I am not a literary scholar nor a human-focused evolutionist or psychologist. My love and interests go more to watching non-human animals in the field and studying their behavior in the laboratory. This field is greatly indebted to Charles Darwin. (54) But for me, as for Carroll, all behavior is of a piece, and as we slice and dice and specialize, it all must come together again. Many ethologists and biologists have written about the origin and development of art, such as Desmond Morris, Dale Guthrie, Jocelyn Crane, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and Wolfgang Wickler. (55) Music is gaining recent attention as well. Early human history and nonhuman premonitions of art and music are increasingly able to be reconstructed based on archeology, anthropology, and study of living nonhuman animals. However, literature has remained the most resistant, since it is dependent on both the development of writing and its preservation. We have no ability to know the stories passed on orally, with the possible exception of preliterate art that may have some narrative thrust. It is thus understandable that those humanistic and historical disciplines dependent on the written word have had little use for evolution until recently. Besides, their adherents may claim, since writing is such a recent innovation in human history, evolution probably has little to do with it. Here I will make some general comments on the issues discussed by Carroll, the status of cross-disciplinary evolutionary thinking derived from my experience, and comment on the research program that he advocates. Joseph Carroll visited the University of Tennessee some years ago after I had organized an interdisciplinary colloquy on Evolution and Culture. This colloquy grew out of a luncheon talk I gave to a large group of faculty interested in interdisciplinary outreach at the university. The talk was on the promise and perils of the "new" evolutionary psychology. The resulting colloquy lasted for a number of years involving professors from English, sociology, economics, history, psychology, philosophy, classics, biology, computer science, modern languages, law, political science, and anthropology. After several invigorating years, our university administration had a call for interdepartmental research/training proposals. Our proposal to formalize our bottoms-up faculty initiative with significant funding for courses, visiting fellows, and graduate students was summarily rejected as nothing new! What I also discovered is that for all their general interest in evolution, suspicions of a real incorporation of evolutionary thinking into their fields were a threat to many faculty members, even the sympathetic. Although we began with a noted evolutionary biologist at UT giving a primer on levels of selection and a series of other presentations on evolution and Darwinism, for too many evolution was, at most, just one more perspective to be added to their field, as Carroll notes. Suspicions of evolutionary hegemony, social darwinism, genetic determinism, quantitative science, and the sensationalist claims made in popular books and magazines were too strong. …

Focalization as Education: The Race Relation Optimism of the Narrator of Charles Chesnutt's the Marrow of Tradition (1901)

Abstract: How Ideas from Narrative Theory Can Inform Debates about Chesnutt's Novel Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition is nominally set in the fictional town of Wellington, but actually relates to events of the 1898 white supremacist race riot that took place in the real town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Janet and Doctor William Miller, Olivia and Major Edward Carteret are the two couples at the center of the plot. The Carterets are white: Edward is a member of the town' s "Big Three" white supremacist leadership and owner-editor of the foremost newspaper, which he uses to agitate for a white uprising against the elected Populist government. The Millers are mulattoes, which in white Wellington society stigmatizes them as social outcasts, although William is a world-class surgeon and a rich man. (1) The tie between the two families is that Janet and Olivia are half-sisters of the same father. Janet would like her sister to acknowledge her; Olivia would prefer not to notice Janet's existence. Against the backdrop of building tension and violent execution of the race riot, the plot brings the two families into dramatic conflict with one another, but the story ends by implying that reconciliation between the Millers and Carterets is possible, further suggesting that this particular racial reconciliation might be extended to blacks and whites in general. Chesnutt envisioned Tradition as a "literary successor" to earlier books like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (McElrath 498). However, poor initial reviews and sales prevented Tradition from having the immediate social impact Chesnutt had hoped for, and it was not until the 1970s that the book began to enjoy any kind of widespread and positive reputation. By 1993, Eric Sundquist influentially claimed that Tradition was the turn of the twentieth century's best novelistic representation "of the racial politics of the nation in the aftermath of Reconstruction" (453). Sundquist would seem to agree with the interpretation of relations between the novel's two principal families--the Carterets and the Millers--as Chesnutt's optimistic allegory for twentieth century race relations between blacks and whites (406-7, 449). But many other scholars disagree that Tradition carries any message of optimism, and express their interpretive decision by designating a specific character as the hero of the novel. Most critics who agree with Sundquist in characterizing Tradition's racial politics as "optimistic" choose William as the book's hero. Other scholars leaning towards a "pessimistic" reading select William's wife, Janet, while still others name the character of Josh Green, who leads other blacks in violent resistance to the riot launched by Edward's racist newspaper. Which of these three characters the critic chooses as hero anticipates a whole reading of the novel. If one picks William, the story is guardedly optimistic about future race relations. If one chooses Janet, the book is probably read as black-separatist and feminist. If one picks Josh, Tradition is a black-militant declaration of defensive war. (2) However, some scholars who refuse William the status of protagonist-hero seem to equate their own interpretations of Tradition with the beliefs of Charles Chesnutt. If these scholars are, as they seem to be, making claims about the flesh and blood Chesnutt, then biographical information becomes relevant. Chesnutt self-identified as seven-eighths white, may have felt "intellectually and racially" estranged from both blacks and whites, and once claimed never to have written "as a Negro" (Fossett 113; Gleason 30, 36). Photographs prove that one could probably not distinguish Chesnutt as having African-American ancestry without being told so (Fossett 118). In 1900, two years after the Wilmington riot and one year before publication of Tradition, Chesnutt published an article titled "The Future American: A Complete Race Amalgamation Likely to Occur," making it unlikely that the biographical Charles Chesnutt was at this period willing to publicly represent himself as anything other than a racial assimilationist. …

Compliments and Complements

Abstract: From the evidence offered in Carroll's target article, we can say that Darwinian Literary Studies (DLS) have come of age. Once Ellen Dissanayake (What is Art For?, Homo Aestheticus) demonstrated the presence of "making special," a feature salient to natural selection, in works of art of all cultures, all periods, it seemed evident, at least to a few of us, that all artistic media would be encompassed in a paradigm like that described by Carroll. Looking back over the past three decades, from Dissanayake's first article on art and ritual ("Hypothesis"), it seems obvious that the time was ripe. Until the mid-nineties the nascent field was characterized by something like "convergent evolution," as investigators working independently arrived at similar conclusions. Carroll' s Evolution and Literary Theory (1995) had a profound impact and became a rallying point for the field. It set out a large-scale theoretical program and helped isolated researchers realize that they were part of a collective effort. Carroll has continued to play a major role in this effort both by pursuing his own individual research and by repeatedly surveying and critiquing the field as a whole. The target essay makes bold and sweeping claims. Some readers might understandably quail at the prospect of an all-encompassing, apparently monolithic, critical perspective conveyed in often alien language and suggesting, perhaps, an air of arrogant intellectual superiority. I strongly support the general program described by Carroll, but I think some qualifications and modulations could help promote wider acceptance. The chief promise of DLS lies in its potential to explain what I term differential interest. The central function of any viable modern work of art is to attract our attention. Some do this better than others, indeed, repeatedly, possibly for predictable reasons. Darwinian scholars often cite the universality of themes related to genetic issues readily adducible to genetic influences. Although literary fashions change, some subjects are virtually ubiquitous, while others are rarely, if ever encountered. Incest avoidance, romantic love, birth defects, interpersonal justice, and other issues of adaptive significance not only are universal. Ancient environments are often reflected in modern literature. Albeit snakes are now a minor threat, science fiction continues to swarm with "Dracs," much as folktales once teemed with dragons. (58) The same plots get written over and over again because we never tire of reading them. Others are ignored. One exception derives from a wager: Chekhov's story about an ashtray. A related feature is that these so-called universals appear to elicit nearly inexhaustible interest. This is certainly a feature of oral literature; however rich a given tradition, it is nevertheless quite restricted by modern standards. Just the same, it presumably sufficed to satisfy its host population over the course of entire lives. Inevitably this meant rehearing the same tales several, possibly many times. Perhaps this is why we find them so replete with universals, although, no doubt, other factors are involved. Some of this same limitation may be perceived in other modern narrative media shared by most Western cultures. The core opera repertory could be said to number less than two hundred works. Yet more (or, literally, less), full-length narrative ballet is dominated by the same six or seven pieces. (59) And it may hold true for us, inasmuch as most scholars of modern literature reread favorite classics with deepening satisfaction. The relationship of DLS to other critical perspectives is not necessarily hostile. One obvious exception is the cultural constructivists' complete rejection of genetic influences on human behavior, a position increasingly untenable in the face of recent behavioral science. But need we throw out the baby with the bath water? Are there no valid findings of LitCrit that may find a welcome place in Carroll's paradigm? …

R.M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Eds.: Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation

Abstract: R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo, eds. Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. xv + 295 pp. $74.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. Berry and Di Leo's edited collection, originally derived from a special issue of symploke in 2004, offers readers an in-depth account of the "state," if we can term it such, of contemporary prose. That said, such blanket statements are not conducive to explaining the multi-faceted approaches that this collection explores. Berry and Di Leo have brought together a range of authors and critics in a bid to address the question, "what does 'fiction's present' mean?" The chapters, whilst exploring the parameters of this question, obviously never fully answer it because, as the editors' preface notes, "the present materializes in quarrels" (xiii). As a result, this collection is difficult to summarize, and this is precisely its point; "fiction's present" is not a monolithic or hegemonic concept, but something to be debated across and between the twenty essays contained within. In this sense, it offers a US alternative to an UK edited collection, Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks. Whilst Literature and the Contemporary focuses primarily upon critical understandings of the "contemporary" and the "thickness of time and temporality" in the face of a pervasive sense of acceleration and ahistoricism (10), Fiction's Present articulates a more complex--if ultimately more diffuse--conundrum of where such a "thickness" might be found. Between the editors' Preface and Brian McHale's Afterword is a diverse array of names and concepts brought together to not only understand the historical situation of where fiction finds itself at present, but also how we are to understand the means through which fiction presents itself, and the grounds upon which the nature of "fiction's present" can be debated. For example, some of the authors in this collection situate "fiction's present" in its relationship to literary history (such as Jerome Klinkowitz, Joseph McElroy, Ronald Sukenick), and their contributions are some of the most useful grounding essays in the book, showing a series of contemporaneous snapshots of fictional "presents." Others, however, situate it in contradistinction to other media forms (Raymond Federman, Robert L. McLaughlin), language (Christina Milletti), globalization (Timothy S. Murphy), philosophical thought (Brian Evenson), or even in textual misrecognition and self-deception (Sue-Im Lee, Alan Singer). Some contributors seemingly believe innovation is to be found in narrative freedom and experimentation (Leslie Scalapino, Milletti, Lance Olsen), others in constraint and historical boundaries (Joseph Tabbi, Robert L. Caserio). Whether situating "fiction's present" within or external to the text, whether "creative" or "critical" writing, whether long or short, each response negotiates with the others to produce an often nuanced, occasionally contradictory overview of the various understandings of "fiction's present." In these terms, I think the seventh, eighth, and ninth theses of the editors' contribution, "12 Theses on Fiction's Present," are particularly relevant. Thesis 7 tells us that "Totalizing versions of fiction's present must be regarded with skepticism" (5), which goes some way towards explaining the difficulty in bridging between the debates, and the chasm that this thesis opens between theses 8 and 9: "8. All accounts of fiction's present are local and must become so ... 9. All accounts of fiction's present are global and must become so" (6). Fiction is "present" between the local and the global, between its realized past and an unknown future. This leads us to the all-important verb in the subtitle, "situating contemporary narrative innovation." This is not a collection that intends to explain, rationalize, or define "contemporary narrative innovation," but to situate it in the excluded middles which oversimplified perceptions of fiction, criticism, and history elide. …

Rejoinder to the Responses

Abstract: 1. The Range of Response Before taking up particular issues raised in the responses, I shall sort them roughly into four groups distinguished by hypothetical ratings they might have assigned to the contentions in the target article: (1) Reject, (2) Revise and Resubmit, (3) Accept with Some Revision, and (4) Accept. In me "Reject" group, I would locate three responses, those by GOODHEART, SEAMON, and SPOLSKY. They aim at general, acrossthe-board repudiation. "Revise and Resubmit" could be defined as "cautious partial acceptance, with some substantial reservations." This description could be applied to the responses by CREWS, HOGAN, JACKSON, JANNIDIS, AND KELLETER. The third group contains commentaries by respondents who accept the idea of an evolutionary paradigm but concentrate on challenging one or more formulations in the target article: BOYD, BURGHARDT, EIBL AND MELLMANN, TOY AND GERRIG, FROMM, GRODAL, HARPHAM, MIALL, MICHELSON, SCALISE SUGIYAMA, SLINGERLAND, D. L. SMITH, MURRAY SMITH, STOREY, and VERMEULE. The fourth group consists of respondents who accept the idea of an evolutionary paradigm and occupy themselves chiefly with reflecting on its rationale, probing its conceptual structure, or extending its reach: cooke, DISSANAYAKE, ESLINGER, GOTTSCHALL, HORVATH, SALMON, SAUNDERS, and SWIRSKI. (Part of the response co-authored by MALLORY-KANI AND WOMACK could be included in the second group, and part in the fourth.) The third and fourth groups overlap a good deal. Most of the respondents who challenge specific formulations in the target article also offer general reflections on evolutionary literary stuthes, and no respondent, presumably, agrees completely with every formulation in the target article. To all of those who have taken the target article seriously enough to feel that it merits a response, even if only a hostile response, my sincere thanks. To those who feel I have whittled their square responses to fit them into these four round holes, my apologies. BRETT CCOKE observes that "some readers might understandably quail at the prospect of an all-encompassing, apparently monolithic, critical perspective." They might, and they do. Under the general heading of "A Grand Theory," below, I sort these reservations into several sub-headings. Some respondents raise the question as to whether the evolutionary social sciences themselves display any recognizable consensus. Others tacitly accept the findings of evolutionary social science but still question whether biological reductions can encompass all things human. The most important alternative to adaptationist views of human nature is cultural constructivism - the idea that culture exercises autonomous causal force in human thought, feeling, and behavior. Some theorists would explicitly repudiate cultural constructivism but still worry that an evolutionary approach will strip out specifically literary modes of thought. Otiiers argue that evolutionary psychology might be true but is often not relevant to specifically literary concerns. Some respondents suggest limitations in the range of literary works that can be effectively brought within the interpretive rubric of evolutionary psychology. More than half of the respondents believe that evolutionary social science can provide the basis for a Grand Theory of Literature and acknowledge the necessity of incorporating concepts that are specifically literary. They also recognize that theories about the adaptive function of literature form a necessary bridge between these two domains. For many respondents, that is where agreement stops. The amount of attention the respondents devoted to the adaptive function of literature signals that this issue is both crucially important and heavily disputed. In reflecting on these responses, I identify the chief competing hypotheses, assess their cogency, and point toward further research that could lead us toward a reasoned consensus. 2. A Grand Theory There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. …

Response to Joseph Carroll

Abstract: Joseph Carroll's writing has been enormously important to me. Everything I say here is meant with the deepest appreciation for his energy, kindness, intelligence, and sheer dogged persistence in advancing the cause of literary Darwinism. My remarks are skeptical, but only because I think appreciating art and explaining it are two somewhat distinct activities. Darwinian literary study aims to improve the ways we explain art and to improve the content of our explanations. I heartily support this effort. I only doubt that it will make much difference to what English professors do, which is to help people touch the terrible danger and power of art. When I started graduate school in 1990, we were required to take a course in literary methods. Most graduate programs offer such courses yet their contents are always changing, their syllabi shaped by the tastes of whoever is in charge. This would hardly be true in any other discipline - physics, say, or economics, or musicology . What does this tell us about literary methods? Years of pondering this question have led me to conclude that - to put it bluntly - there are no literary methods because literary study is not a discipline. Its practitioners are not scientists but members of a secular clerisy drawn to some branch or other of quasitheological speculation. To say this is in no way to impugn my profession. In fact I rather like this state of affairs. I believe deeply in the transformative, inspirational, soul-shaking power of literature. I am enormously grateful that universities have, for reasons of their own, given a place to humanists to explore aesthetic power (even though nobody comes right out and admits that that's what we do). In my own intellectual life I am a committed Darwinian and a rabid anti-mysterian. But I've come to believe that literary study is a branch of human spiritual practice rather than human knowledge - split religion, if you like, rather than split science. All of this makes the challenge from Joseph Carroll and the literary Darwinians especially intriguing. Carroll argues that taking a consilient approach to literary study holds out the hope of progress in the discipline. What does this challenge mean? Where will it lead? I am desperately rooting for it to succeed simply out of intellectual loneliness. Theory is responsible for some of the deep eclecticism of today's humanities, having become, in its terminal stages, so unfalsifiable as to leave people with nothing to say to each other. Someone can make a specious claim, about language or gender, and nobody will try to refute it. Someone else can make another specious claim - and silence again. Pretty soon everyone is stuck in their own corner muttering to themselves - this is the university as Borges or Swift might have imagined it. Literary darwinism gives us a chance to speak with a common language, a language that runs with the grain of human nature rather than in any old direction. This will certainly improve the intellectual climate overall: more interesting conferences, fewer silly statements, less hair-tearing, less teeth-gnashing (I speak for myself). So what are my doubts? Only that having a common, science-based language will make much difference to what English professors do. Aesthetic power - the love and appreciation of great art - taps into that old oceanic feeling. Humanists are tour guides to the ocean's depths as much as, and probably more than, we are oceanographers sitting on the surface and measuring the sea. The most successful members of our profession are not philosophers or historians but still even at this late date, critics - people who explain really well what artists are up to (about which more in a moment). Whether it is practiced on the page or in the classroom, good criticism is a fiendishly difficult craft. People crave explanations of art, insofar as they do, because knowing some context dramatically increases the pleasure art gives us. Just as challenges from science have not in the least lessened the grip of religious belief on people's psyches, so challenges from empiricist humanists are not going to lessen the grip of aesthetic power. …

Narrative and the Minds of Others

Abstract: Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. xxiv + 343 pp. Theorists of narrative have recently begun drawing on developments in the cognitive sciences, including cognitive, evolutionary, and social psychology, Artificial-Intelligence research, language theory, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind, to explore how frameworks for studying intelligent behavior can throw light on storytelling practices as well as the narrative artifacts that emanate from them. Analysts working in this domain--the domain of cognitive narratology, broadly speaking--have examined how interpreting stories depends on the same processes of folk-psychological reasoning that people deploy in everyday life to make sense of their own and others' conduct. (1) At issue is people's everyday understanding of how thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which they resort in thinking about thinking itself. We use these heuristics to impute motives or goals to others, to evaluate the bases of our own conduct, and to make predictions about future reactions to events. By the same token, if I read a newspaper story about the reunion of long-separated siblings or a novel whose protagonist tragically overestimates the good will of the other characters, I will make sense of these accounts by ascribing a range of beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and goals to the inhabitants of" each storyworld. In the case of the newspaper report, I will assume, for example, that each sibling believes (and believes that the other believes) that they share the same parents, that each desires (and believes that the other desires) to reconnect, and that both experience joy, among other powerful emotions, when they are reunited. By contrast, to make sense of the novel I will assume an asymmetric structure of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Whereas the protagonist (call her Isabel Archer) acts in good faith and aims to promote others' as well as her own best interests, her counterparts more or less surreptitiously privilege their particular interests and objectives over those of the protagonist, with the resulting mismatch of beliefs, desires, and goals leading either to a tragic finale or, in another kind of plot, to eventual success built on the mastery of painful lessons about how people may very well be otherwise than they seem. To account for the assumptions and inferences that readers make about the minds of characters in storyworlds such as these, theorists of narrative have adapted research by evolutionary and cognitive psychologists (among others) suggesting that human beings' mind-reading ability is a biological endowment, a capacity passed down as a phylogenetic inheritance that is acquired in ontogeny--except for people with developmental impairments such as autism. Challenging the underlying premises of much of this research, Daniel D. Hutto's cogently argued, thoroughly documented, and stylishly written Folk Psychological Narratives also constitutes a challenge for the narrative scholarship that seeks to recruit from existing accounts of mindreading processes and abilities. Indeed, Hutto's study will be of special interest to cognitive narratologists, since his approach can be described as the converse of that adopted by story analysts who have looked to other fields to characterize modes of mindreading in narrative contexts. Rather than focusing on ways in which narrative interpretation entails "an attempt to make sense of characters' minds, Hutto hypothesizes that storytelling practices are a basis for being able to make sense of minds in the first place--that is, for the ability to formulate appropriate, well-structured inferences about people's reasons for acting. According to this hypothesis, which Hutto calls the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH), narratives constitute a primary resource for constructing folk-psychological templates thanks to which circumstances, participants, actions, and intentional states of various kinds can be connected together into (more or less) coherent accounts of why people do the things they do. …

Ideas of Order: Artists Describing the Arts

Abstract: Discussing the adaptive functions of human art, Joseph Carroll highlights its role in organizing the capacity of the mind to envision circumstances beyond the immediate. Able to conceptualize future problems and pleasures, to anticipate a multiplicity of outcomes for any event, to speculate about individual motives or group dynamics, and even to foresee their own mortality, humans occupy a mental universe far larger than their actual physical and social environment. "The Brain--is wider than the sky--," as Emily Dickinson observes (Poem 262). The uniquely anticipatory, creatively constructive characteristics of human psychology have proven to be a source of strength for the species, ensuring "behavioral flexibility" in handling "contingent circumstances" (122). At the same time, however, these abilities are the source of "potential chaos" and "psychological exile" for the restlessly hypothesizing individual mind (Wilson 224-25). By ordering and interpreting the welter of interior hopes, fears, and schemes, art counters psychic chaos and isolation: deliberately shaped artifacts--in paint, in music, in words--seek to teach, to console, to cheer, or to inspire. The ordered completeness of the imagined worlds artists construct is underscored by their recognition of the fragmented, confusing character of human consciousness. Without assistance such as that supplied by art, individuals tend to become lost in the dismaying multiplicity of their own projections, memories, and hypotheses. The sometimes overpowering richness of the external environment is magnified, on a moment-by-moment basis, by an avalanche of interior responses to it. In consequence, as Wallace Stevens points out, "we live in a constellation / Of patches and of pitches, / Not in a single world" ("July Mountain"). No one has described the "thousand odd, disconnected fragments" comprising individual awareness better than Virginia Woolf: "hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting," the contents of the "rag-bag of odds and ends within us" tease and exasperate (Orlando 78). Seeking to understand the self as "nothing but one self," its life's experience as "a single, downright, bluff piece of work," the individual is confronted instead with a hodge-podge of interiority that recklessly overlays sense impressions with the "capricious" effects of memory, apprehension, and desire (310, 78). The result, Woolf avers, is that "nothing [can] ever be seen whole": "body and mind [are] like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack" (307). This "chopping up small of body and mind" threatens to annihilate identity: one feels "disassembled" by a myriad of "separate scraps" all simultaneously attempting to define the self and direct its thinking (307). Woolf goes so far as to speculate that consciousness is an amalgam of "many different people ... all having lodgement ... in the human spirit," each manifesting its own eccentric "sympathies, little constitutions and rights" (308). Prufrock, T.S. Eliot's famous antihero, poignantly illustrates the psychologically debilitating problem of the "proliferation of possibilities" Woolf so vividly evokes (122): he finds himself immobilized by his capacity to project negative outcomes. The frenzied activity of his mental operations ("a hundred indecisions ... a hundred visions and revisions" which "a minute will reverse") stands in ironic contrast to his social paralysis: "And how should I presume?" ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). Artists seek to counteract the chaos within, Carroll points out, by fashioning "an imaginative universe," an alternative "virtual world" in which the plethora of possibilities generated by the mind assumes a satisfyingly cohesive, coherent, and aesthetic form (127). Literary artists have sought repeatedly to articulate this crucial feature of their work: the creation of a compelling parallel universe. They have employed powerful metaphors to describe the fictive realities into which they propel their readers. …

Four Ways to Skin a Cat: Evolution and Literary Study

Abstract: Some disciplines are fortunate to find expositors who are as erudite as eloquent. Evolution had its Darwin, behaviourist psychology, had Skinner, transformational linguistics had Chomsky - and Darwinian literary studies has Joseph Carroll. For almost two decades, he has done as much as anyone else to bring the discipline into being, then into focus. "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study" is but the latest effort to forge a consilient paradigm of literary study. In the spirit and the letter of the essay, I will therefore briefly outline several research avenues for literary study it touches on. 1. The Turing Test "Underlying this inquiry is the assumption that the evolution of computing machines will lead to the point when they become able spontaneously to create works of literature." - Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science (93) In the version of evolutionary psychology that lies behind Steven Pinker's view of the arts, writes Carroll, "die governing conception of the mind is computational, and the governing metaphor for the mind is that of the computer". Significantly, until recently the AI optimists were still reluctant to concede the defeat of die topdown (GOFAI) approach that spoon-fed computers information which, at some point, was supposed to jumpstart independent thinking. Now we know it's a deadend. A thinking computer will not be built: rather, it will build itself by modifying its rulebook, erasing some pre-loaded instructions, adding new ones, and turning itself effectively into an intentional black box. In one word, it will evolve. Generally speaking, survival-oriented behaviour comes in two flavours (in actuality it is hard to find them in isolation). The first is the genotypal homeostat whose hard-wired instincts guarantee a swift response to standard environmental stimuli. The other is the phenotypal homeostat - one that learns, i.e. organizes its behaviour on the basis of historically acquired knowledge. Learning is an ability to acquire information and feed it back into its behaviour, including notably the learning process itself. The chronic absence of success in programming general problem-solving heuristics indicates that progress in that domain will come about only when computers will learn to learn. A learning system will able to rewrite its program in the course of its operations, possibly changing its configuration to the point where it will become a categorically different, independently thinking, one. There are principled ways of investigating whether computers can (be said to) think, and by far the most famous and controversial among them is the Turing test (TT). Most arguments about the evolution of thinking in computers end up being arguments about the validity and extension of the TT. Significantly, from the point of view of literary theorists, the heart of the matter is the subject's verbal performance during the TT, which warrants analysis in linguistic, narratological, rhetorical, and cognate terms. Even more significantly, from the point of view of literary evolutionary theorists, the variety of pragmatic Mutual Contextual Beliefs inherent in the TT entails the formulation of a Theory of Mind by the examiner or, in the upgrade of the test I proposed in Between Literature and Science - by the computer itself. Research in literary studies might make a contribution to the analysis of the Turing test-framed dimension of evolving, thinking, and ultimately literature-creating (third-order) computers. 2. Game Theory "Before drawing the two matrixes for the Mission Game, I must encourage readers to resist the feeling that this sort of analysis may be too arcane for them to understand." - Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge (142) Evolution and game theory fuse directly in evolutionary game theory. Insofar as it makes little sense to treat animals as rational decision-makers, evolutionary game theory treats environmentally stable outcomes as survival strategies sustained by evolution, whereby the payoffs for animal populations are assumed to reflect their degree of environmental fitness. …

Evolutionary Psychology and Literary Studies

Abstract: In the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology there are now complex models of human nature on offer, and it is a frequently-discussed question whether these models can be made useful for the humanities too. (81) One of the central issues in this debate is the question of whether there is something like a definable human nature at all or just a blank slate ready to be shaped by totally different forms of culture. Obviously humans are not determined in their behaviour by the clear cut genetic programs found in many animals. Does this mean that human behaviour is not determined at all by any genetic disposition? Is the only biological heritage humans have--in relation to their behaviour and the way their minds operate--a boundless plasticity for culture? The evidence brought forward in the last few years has caused many observers to assume that the answer to this question is 'no'. Most models explaining the evidence agree on the point that in the course of evolution humans adapted to culture and in ontogeny humans need culture in order to develop, while culture in itself is always evolving. Therefore we can speak of a coevolution of biological dispositions and human culture. In contrast to Joseph Carroll ("Human Nature and Literary Meaning"), it seems to me that it is still very unclear what kind of human universals there are, and how their interaction with culture can be modelled; likewise, it is uncertain how the interaction between dispositions, cultural traditions and individual variances of dispositions, and of the experience of culture, ultimately comes together. Nevertheless everyone interested in human culture is asked to take these assumptions about human nature into account and that includes humanists who are interested in the study of art and literature. Joseph Carroll considers that the best way of doing this is to include art in the set of phenomena explained by evolutionary psychology. In his view art has to fulfil an adaptive function--therefore it can be explained by evolutionary psychology--and he defines three criteria which any explanation has to satisfy: (a) Define art in a way that identifies what is peculiar and essential to it--thus isolating the behavioural disposition in question', (b) identify the adaptive problem this behavioural disposition would have solved in ancestral environments; and (c) identify design features that would efficiently have mediated this solution. In the following I will argue that (1) his basic assumption, that art fulfils an adaptive function, is problematic and (2) therefore the function he ascribes to evolutionary psychology has to be reconsidered. (1) The Adaptive Function of Art Talking about the adaptive function of art presupposes that there is something like 'art': not a culturally specific set of activities grouped by this culture under one label and understood as belonging together, but something which can be seen on the analytical level as an activity or a set of activities all conforming to one definition. Carroll proposes such a definition: [Art is] "the disposition for creating artifacts that are emotionally charged and aesthetically shaped in such a way that they evoke or depict subjective, qualitative sensations, images, or ideas." I am not sure why Carroll is talking about the 'disposition for creating artifacts' and not the artifacts themselves, because obviously they are at the centre of his definition. On a closer view it becomes clear that it is a very broad definition and encompasses many artifacts we do not usually classify as art, like the speeches of ancient orators, the Christian cross, advertisements, the ceremonies at baroque courts, cars or haircuts, to name just a few. In the text following his definition Carroll cites studies which see humans as a 'story-telling species,' or see a 'species-typical need for finding and making meaning' prototypically found in the rhythmic and emotionally modulated interactions of mothers and infants, or see stories as a means to organize our lives, etc. …

For Evolutionary Criticism, against Genetic Absolutism

Abstract: Joseph Carroll's overview of evolutionary literary criticism and theory is lucid, wide-ranging, and sensible He presents a strong case for the value of an evolutionary approach to literature I entirely agree that evolutionary theory can make illuminating contributions to the study of the arts (see "Laughing" and Understanding) I hope many readers are convinced by this aspect of Carroll's essay On the other hand, I do not agree with a project of making evolutionary theory the defining approach to literary study Carroll states that "If evolutionary psychology can give a true and comprehensive account of human nature, it can ultimately encompass, subsume, or supplant the explanatory systems that currently prevail in the humanities" I demur from this view on many grounds Consider, for example, something as central to literary study as reputation It seems clear that, say, Shakespeare's reputation is the result, of many factors Some involve the possibility of making use of his work ideologically, as in the wartime cooptation of Henry V Some involve the political economy of publication (eg, the ownership of copyright - see Taylor) Some involve Shakespeare's incorporation into the English education system and the spread of that system via colonialism Some involve network factors, such that Shakespeare connections reached a tipping point, while those for other writers did not The list could be extended almost indefinitely None of these explanatory systems is evolutionary Of course, an evolutionary critic could respond that all such systems must be compatible with the results of evolution Ideological effects cannot operate on cognitive mechanisms that have not evolved, for example That is true, but trivial It does not show us that the evolutionary account should play a significant, not to mind "encompassing, subsuming, or supplanting" role in explaining the ideological use of Henry V The same point holds for, say, physics The ideological use of the play cannot violate the laws of physics That does not mean that physics contributes significantly to explaining the ideological uses of the play What about a more limited project, then - say, explaining literary universals? Carroll characterizes universals as "cross-cultural regularities that derive from regularities in human nature" But universals may be produced in many ways In consequence, our explanatory principles should not be confined to biology As I have discussed elsewhere ("Non-Genetic," "Of Universals"), cross-cultural patterns may arise from regularities in' the physical environment, recurring developmental experiences that are not genetically programmed, emergent features of the phenomenology of self-consciousness (Hogan, "Literature"), convergent results of group dynamics, network patterns, etc My qualms about some aspects of the evolutionary study of literature are related to the common distinction between evolutionary psychology and Evolutionary Psychology, since much work in evolution and literature involves not only the former, but the latter as well When writers refer to "evolutionary psychology," lower case, they have in mind a view along the following lines The brain evolved; the mind is an emergent system causally dependent upon the brain; thus structures, processes, and even some contents of the mind must be open to evolutionary accounts, to the extent that their neurological substrates are open to such accounts In my view, this should be uncontroversial In contrast, when writers refer to "Evolutionary Psychology" (EP), upper case, they have in mind a specific set of hypotheses and a set of approaches and theoretical preferences that characterize a particular group of researchers in evolutionary psychology, including Tooby, Cosmides, Pinker, and others Since I have argued against some aspects of EP elsewhere (Cognitive), and since others have addressed these issues at length (for example, Buller), I will not overview the topic …

A Mind Enslaved?: The Interaction of Metaphor, Cognitive Distance, and Narrative Framing in Chesnutt's "Dave's Neckliss"

Abstract: Charles Chesnutt--African-American novelist, essayist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--has become the subject of intense scholarly interest in recent years, particularly for his "conjure tales," which Robert Bone once called "the most important product of the black imagination prior to the First World War" (75). (1) These tales have held a dubious status as Chesnutt's most successful works, but works about which he felt ambivalent, and which he would have given up writing after the successful placement of the first few in The Atlantic Monthly, were it not for the request of his Houghton Mifflin editor to continue producing similar stories for a collection. (2) The tales have more recently been restored to their rightful place as the centerpiece of Chesnutt's legacy. The folkloric storytelling tradition which forms the core of the conjure tales' narrative structure has long been recognized for its power to convey biting satire in the form of a veiled, figurative meaning. (3) It is with understanding the power of this figurativity, harnessed so brilliantly by Chesnutt, that this paper is concerned. I examine one story in particular, "Dave's Neckliss," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1889 and has since been recognized by some critics as one of Chesnutt's best stories. The story, though, is still largely unknown in wider circles, and deserves to be singled out for extended analysis. This story is structurally representative of the entire set of conjure stories, which all consist of an inner tale framed by an outer narrative. (4) The outer frames are narrated in standard dialect by John, who with his wife Annie has moved from Ohio to the North Carolina piedmont several years after the Civil War. (5) As the new owner and cultivator of a North Carolina vineyard, John displays a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes entrepreneurial interest in both the landscape and the people of the region, particularly the former slaves. John and Annie pass the time by requesting and listening to stories told by the man they call "Uncle Julius," whom they seem to regard as a harmless old slave with an interesting past enhanced by a lively imagination. The inner tales, narrated exclusively by Julius in a slave dialect represented orthographically, (6) are stories from the days of slavery when the vineyard was a working plantation. Many of the tales feature the use of conjure, most often performed by a conjure woman named Aunt Peggy who lives separately from the primary slave characters. Often fantastic, the tales consist of common folkloric plots such as slaves being transfigured (into a tree, a donkey, a frog, a grapevine, a gray wolf, and a hummingbird, for instance). (7) Though descriptions of actual beatings are not prominent, the tales depict the psychological suffering of slaves who are separated from family and spouses, exploited, and made vulnerable to real and imagined threats. For example, when Becky is callously separated from her infant in "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," she and the baby suffer such mental distress that they both become physically ill. The difficult conditions and psychological traumas suffered by slaves are not completely disguised; but the emotional impact and significance is heightened and intensified through metaphor, which provides an extra-literal significance unachievable through description alone. Framing is a common literary device that has helped writers across centuries mimic the act of listening to a story by presenting two distinct storytelling situations: an outer frame introduced by a narrator who has recorded the story for a literate audience that is not physically present, and an inner framed story representing an oral tale told at a given place in a specific amount of time by a storyteller to a listening audience. Whether the storyteller is Shahrazad in The Thousand and One Nights, the Miller in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the mariner in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Uncle Julius in Chesnutt's "Dave' s Neckliss," or Captain Littlepage in Jewett' s The Country of the Pointed Firs, readers accept that the story is transmitted as it was told to the "original" listening audience, thus recreating the listening experience. …

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. …

Evoluntionary Theory and the Naturalist Fallacy

Abstract: Joseph Carroll's target article "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Studies" makes a bold argument for the importance of an evolutionary perspective in the humanities, and it provides a sweeping overview of the literary research based on evolutionary theory. Carroll makes important arguments for the necessity of fusing methods and research results from the humanities and the natural sciences and the necessity of combining cognitive and evolutionary perspectives. (I make similar arguments in Embodied Visions.) To build bridges between the sciences and the humanities is a vital project if the humanities are to survive as a scholarly endeavor. Central to Carroll's argument is to reopen the question of Human Nature. Given the way social constructivism in sociology and the humanities has neglected universals based on innate features of human nature, this is a crucially important move. The question of human universals has not been central to the study of fiction since the Structuralist era, and social constructionists have falsely presupposed that the human brain has no innate architecture and is thus infinitely malleable. Carroll argues convincingly that the central themes in literature reflect problems that have been vital to human survival. Further, Carroll's emphasis on universalism avoids an excessive reliance on a fine-grained modularity, and the critique of massive modularity is a convincing argument for the role of culture in establishing universal themes and structures. Carroll also gives an important emphasis to the idea that culture can only be instantiated in individual brains with specific life histories. In short, the target article is a great argument for the value of evolutionary bioculturalism. The most tricky part of the article is the section on the adaptive function of literature, which raises many thorny questions and problems. The central problem in the article is linked to the use of the word "art." Carroll wants both to define "what is peculiar and essential" to art and to identify a specific adaptive problem that this peculiar and essential mental disposition would have fulfilled in ancestral environments. He further wants to identify design features that mediated this adaptive function. The problems derive from the requirement that art should be something peculiar and essential, since such an essentialist definition relies on a rather historically specific understanding of art related to its institutionalization. It makes much more evolutionary sense to see the different activities that we now call art as developed out of a series of adaptations that have provided behavioral flexibility. Activities like storytelling develop in tandem with the radical increase of intelligence and the ability to provide verbal representations of memorized or imagined scenarios. As pointed out by Carroll and E. O. Wilson, whom Carroll cites, flexible intelligence evidently had enormous adaptive advantages. A flexible intelligence even supports inventions of recent art activities like film or video games that run on the old bio-computer developed in the Pleistocene by synthesizing visual, acoustic, and narrative skills. There are no special design features in the brain developed in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness) and reserved for an art-essence, for instance film art, to be invented many years later. Different arts and different types of a given art activate different mental capacities, and although it is highly probable that we could identify neurological activity typical of a given aesthetic activity, I doubt that it is possible--as Carroll supposes--to identify neural activity specific for aesthetic forms. Art enhances many different activities, from strengthening social bonds to allocating special resources for perceptual activities and thus making certain phenomena special, to borrow Ellen Dissanayake's term for the function of art, or serving as means of strengthening mechanisms for imagining counterfactual situations. …

Literature as Self-Engineering: An Evolutionary Hypothesis

Abstract: "Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose" --Oscar Wilde Joseph Carroll points out in his target article that there is not yet a consensus about the role of literature and the other arts in human evolution. It is not even clear whether or not the art has an adaptive function. If art is adaptive, there must be a reproductively significant problem for which it was, and perhaps still is, a solution. But what is this problem, and how does art provide a solution for it? Answering this question should be at the top of the agenda of anyone seriously interested in a Darwinian approach to literary studies. Carroll takes up the challenge, and after surveying the main contenders--the hypotheses offered by Pinker, Miller, Dissanayake and Boyd--he concludes that Edward O. Wilson's hypothesis about the evolution of art is the most promising option currently on the table. While I am sympathetic with Carroll's aim, I have doubts about the adequacy and coherence of Wilson's hypothesis. In this commentary, I will set out what I think is wrong with Wilson's approach, and then go on to gesture towards an alternative that promises to give a more adequate account of the adaptive function of literature. Wilson holds art is an adaptation: a solution to a problem in living rather than a mere byproduct of evolution, and that as such, it contributed directly to the survival and reproductive success of our prehistoric ancestors. On this view, the adaptive problem for which art supplied a solution was a consequence of the evolution of the human brain. Our "extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts ... gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also extracted a price we continue to pay, composed of a shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment" thus rendering us "psychological exiles" (224-25). In response to this crisis of awareness, early human beings invented the arts to "express and control through magic the abundance of the environment, the power of solidarity, and other forces in their lives that mattered most to survival and reproduction .... The arts still perform this primal function, and in much the same ancient way" (225-26, emphasis added). As enticing as this hypothesis may seem, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile Wilson' s claim that art is an adaptation with his subsequent claim that art is magic. Magic does not enhance reproductive success, nor does it help us to live longer, attract more fertile mates, or have healthier offspring. Although one might argue that magical practices and beliefs provide a reproductive advantage by decreasing stress, this explanation does not seem credible. The costs of art--the time, resources and energy invested in artistic production--would have been unlikely to outweigh what is presumably a relatively small advantage provided by stress-reduction. Also, quite apart from its specifically biological shortcomings, the conjecture that art began and continues to function as a magical way to control the environment strikes me as implausible. It seems to me that most of us seem to be blissfully oblivious to the menacing shadow of mortality, and do not cling to art to soothe our existential pain or provide an illusion of control in a chaotic and hazardous world. If imaginative culture is an adaptation it must have made a significant difference to the material conditions of the lives of prehistoric men and women. But how did it do this? Imaginary culture presupposes the capacity for imagination, so in order to answer this question we will need to understand the adaptive function of imagination simpliciter. There are a dozen or more conceptions of imagination scattered through the scientific and philosophical literature, but for the purpose of this analysis we can start with a conception of it as "the ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-temporal world" (Stevenson 241). …

Updike Gets His Mojo Back

Abstract: Stacey Olster, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Xvi + 193 pp. Hardback $75.00; paperback $24.99. Once upon a time, John Updike lost his mojo. For me, anyway. Back in the mid-1960s, just out of graduate school and reading Updike for the first time, then audaciously teaching his early works in American lit courses (yes, there was a time when it was considered bold or foolish to assign novelists such as Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Roth, or Updike), I had a little romance going with the author's Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). I really loved the modernist experimentalism of the latter (and still do) and, as a former high school basketball player having played in a small country town (a legend, as the song goes, in my own mind), I believed that Harry Angstrom whispered to me on a wavelength only we shared. It was with a pain almost like jealousy that I learned he whispered just as privately to other guys who loved the novel and identified with Rabbit as much as I did. I got over it and found in the novels shortly to follow much to like if not so much with which to identify. By the late 60s and early 70s, the country had lost its Eisenhowerera innocence, but Updike reflected the changes 4engagingly--and graphically--in Couples (1968) and another Angstrom novel, Rabbit Redux (1971). In relation to the former, in the university where I taught, the sexual lives of its folk were hardly, shall we say, as freewheeling as those Updike represented in Couples's Tarbox, but even I could judge that they were less constrained than they had been in the 1950s. As for Redux, it spoke painfully of the changes in the racial landscape growing out of the 60s, ones, indeed, that were already represented in academia in students, programs, and social and political unrest. And as far as I was concerned Updike still had his mojo. But somewhere in the next decades, Updike lost it for me. I did not stop reading him entirely, but I no longer anticipated each new novel with the same excitement, and reading him became a catching up, more a chore than a pleasure. Read Updike? Not tonight. I have a headache. As best I can reconstruct what happened to the magic between us, it had something to do with a suspicion that after the early successes Updike's novels became, oddly, either too predictable or too unpredictable. On the one hand, some of the fiction appeared programmatic, as if, once he developed a bit of shtick, such as the repeated takes on Henry Bech or Rabbit Angstrom or The Scarlet Letter, he rode it too hard and imaginative creativity gave way to the working of a sort of combinatoire. On the other, in such books as The Coup (1978), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), and Brazil (1994), Updike's choices of forms or subject matter seemed merely outre, a way perhaps to pump up a flagging imagination or simply to show readers, in an African subject or magic or metafiction or magical realism, that, hey, I can think outside the box. While Updike rarely abandoned features--quotidian realism, even in such a myth-oriented text as The Centaur, and his preternatural verbal facility--that defined his early work, as a reader I surmised that for Updike neither style nor straight realism was enough and could be redeemed only by shtick or strangeness. Like one of Updike's lapsed believers, I wondered whether there were anything that might reverse my backsliding. Might anything get Updike his mojo back, restore a magic lost for me to his novels and stories? Surprisingly, I found it in the essays in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. It is surprising because, in my experience, it is rare to read a series of essays in a collection like this and to come away with renewed interest in an author rather than exacerbated boredom. But many of these essays have helped me to think about Updike's works differently, and novels I'd had no desire to read I went out and purchased at good old Half Price Books and began working my way through them. …

The Evolving Study of Literature

Abstract: Carroll offers a wide-ranging survey of "literary Darwinism" Along with his prior surveys, it will certainly serve as a starting point for research in what he hopes will become a burgeoning field He is, however, rightly concerned that this new angle on the critical analysis of literature should not become another erratic on the plains of the post-modern glaciation Recognizing the possiblity of a fresh start, grounded on the foundations of the historical sciences, his ultimate hope is for literary Darwinism to contribute new knowledge If this is plausible, it could add to the storehouse of consilient knowledge that has emerged from Darwin's holistic evolutionary perspective That, certainly, would be something that literary criticism has not attempted or been known for, of recent The basis for optimism regarding the possibility of creating new knowledge in literary Darwinism is sound - nothing less than the holistic ecology of evolutionary biology and the interconnections of emergent complexity in the cosmos (Kauffman 1 19) The literary Darwinists reviewed by Carroll attempt to describe the manifestation of this interconnectedness at the level of human culture and reflection Tenuous as first steps may be, we see here a solid foundation from which to escape the political forms that have stymied humanistic scholarship Carroll's optimism regarding the possibilities for a new contribution to knowledge draws our attention directly to manifestations of evolutionary nature in literature and the arts and particularly to the disputed topic of human universals Universals are central adaptive characteristics that have emerged as the human species interacted with its terrestrial environment over millions of years Of course some foundational elements of these universals emerged before humans, making their cultural expression the more powerful and universal (Shubin 27) The basic responses and emotions deriving from the biological prime directives (survival and reproduction) are pre-human and constitute the core of perennial literary themes such as love and war Identifying and describing the manifestation of these universals in literature and the arts is the first great challenge in implementing literary Darwinism as a practical criticism Repeatedly in Carroll's survey of existing research, one senses a struggle to make the connection between the simple elegance of the Darwinian mythos and the cultural and psychological complexities of literature and the arts The surveyed results offer a quilt-work of suggestions ranging from the fundamental to the overwrought So, for example, Brian Boyd's hypothesis that literature is "cognitive play that develops creativity and helps form social identity" (109-10) seems only weakly connected to the temporal character of literature Under the heading "The Adaptive Function of Literature,"similar suppositions (focusing attention on adaptive salients (Dissanayake), focusing shared attention (Boyd), and social cohesion (Boyd and Dissanayake) do not seem to possess the low-level hooks that one looks for in a biologically rooted cultural form Carroll himself observes that the suggested adaptive functionality of enhancing creativity is not specific to the arts; technology does this as well In several places Carroll describes observations that converge on a connection between a basic literary form and a primary environmental condition In an earlier book, Evolution and Literary Theory, Carroll linked several literary phenomena under the rubric "cognitive mapping" (109) Several independent studies in his survey agree that the link between story and environmental processes lies near the centre of literature's adaptive function (for example, Panksepp & Panksepp; EO Wilson's scenario machine; Tooby & Cosmides' "powerful organizing effect") Carroll extrapolates this function from narrative to the arts generally Although this linkage may be apparent in other arts of spatio-temporal representation, generalization at this point seems a mistake …