An evolutionary paradigm for literary study.

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. By including them, Crews gave recognition to a struggling minority that--whatever their failings (as he might see them) in doctrinaire narrowness--shares his respect for reason and evidence. In a recent essay in Style, James Mellard speaks with evident alarm about "a growing army of enthusiasts for a new Darwinian naturalism" (1). So far as this description applies to the social sciences, it is apt enough. Darwinian social scientists hold key positions in prestigious universities, publish works in the mainstream journals in their disciplines, and win large popular audiences among the educated lay public. The literary Darwinists, in contrast, could most accurately be characterized not as an army but as a robust guerilla band. That standing could change fairly soon. If the rate of current publication in the field continues or increases, before long sheer numbers will tilt the balance toward inclusion in casebooks more conventional than Postmodern Pooh.

Institutionally, the literary Darwinists occupy a peculiar position. On the one hand, they are still so marginal that being included in panel sessions and casebooks would constitute an advance in institutional standing. On the other hand, their ultimate aims sweep past any such inclusion. At least among their most ambitious adherents, they aim not at being just one more "school" or "approach." They aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to subsume all other possible approaches to literary study. They rally to Edward O. Wilson's cry for "consilience" among all the branches of learning. Like Wilson, they envision an integrated body of knowledge extending in an unbroken chain of material causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest levels of cultural imagination. And like Wilson, they regard evolutionary biology as the pivotal discipline uniting the hard sciences with the social sciences and the humanities. They believe that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment. They argue that for humans, as for all other species, evolution has shaped the anatomical, physiological, and neurological characteristics of the species, and they think that human behavior, feeling, and thought are fundamentally constrained and informed by those characteristics. They make it their business to consult evolutionary biology and evolutionary social science in order to determine what those characteristics are, and they bring that information to bear on their understanding of the human imagination.

Virtually all literary Darwinists formulate "biocultural" ideas. That is, they argue that the genetically mediated dispositions of human nature interact with specific environmental conditions, including particular cultural traditions. (2) They nonetheless characteristically distinguish themselves from "cultural constructivists" who effectively attribute exclusive shaping power to culture. The Darwinists typically focus on "human universals" or cross-cultural regularities that derive from regularities in human nature. They recognize the potent effect of specific cultural formations, but they argue that a true understanding of any given cultural formation depends on locating it in relation to the elemental, biologically based characteristics that shape all cultures.

2. Literary Darwinism and Cognitive Poetics