Brief introduction to Joseph Carroll and the special issue of Style: an evolutionary paradigm for literary study.

In an article in the New York Times (Nov 6, 2005), a reporter named T. J. Max asked the famous founder of sociobiology and author of Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge, Edward O. Wilson, to "assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, 'Not far enough, in my opinion.' Nonetheless, Max [reported, he looked] 'forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts--especially literature--with its magic.'" What you have in your hands, readers of Style, is a double issue, exploring the evolutionary principles Wilson mentioned, beginning with the writings of Prof. Joseph Carroll (University of Missouri-St. Louis), the scholar who many consider to be the Prospero of adaptationist literary criticism.

Carroll has summarized here in some 35 pages the basic issues of Darwinian literary criticism as it stood in the late spring of 2008. This synthesis was then mailed to a selected group of scholars around the world and more than half responded with brief essays (limited to 1,000 to 2,000 words), ready either to add on or to try to sweep away the magic dust from this most recent of literary critical movements.

Following a summer of intellectual contestation, Carroll then wrote a rejoinder to each respondent, some individually, some as part of an aggregate, arguing with many, confirming the opinions of a few, and dismissive of those constructivists operating mostly out of the old hegemony of "theory." Unfortunately, many of those who consider neo-Darwinian criticism not worth doing, or irrelevant, stand in a long line of literary people uninterested in the relationships between the sciences and the arts. Although no magic wand has yet been able to pry open the eyes of those unconvinced, we hope that this new attempt at explaining consilience could be useful.

For those reading for the first time about neo-Darwinian criticism and Joseph Carroll's role in it, I will be parsimonious here, letting the completed debate act either as the starting point for novices in the field or as information for stimulating further conversation among experienced disputants. Just a brief note first, however, about Prof. Carroll, with the quotations below taken from his own "intellectual autobiography." As a student some 30 years ago, Carroll asked himself a fundamental question: "What kind of knowledge am I ultimately supposed to produce?" His answers early on moved in one of two directions: "to seek expansive scholarly contexts in intellectual history and 'comparative literature,'" or to "delve into authors and texts that seemed particularly difficult or problematic." These twin foci yielded up his books Matthew Arnold's cultural history, and on the poets ...