The evolving study of literature.(Responses)

Carroll offers a wide-ranging survey o["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 119). 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; E.O. 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 ...