GOTTSCHALL, BOYD, FLESCH

THOUGHTS ABOUT DARWINIAN LITERARY CRITICISM

ENGLISH 404OCTOBER 29, 2009

“Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of blood. ”           - A.S. Byatt

“One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one.”

-- Steven Pinker

JONATHAN GOTTSCHALLLiterature, Science, and a New Humanities (2008)

Literary studies should move closer to the sciences in theory, method, and governing ethos.

What is the “liberationist paradigm”?

What is the “liberationist paradigm”?

Active commitment to achieving radical or progressive political ends through scholarly means.

What is the “liberationist paradigm”?

Active commitment to achieving radical or progressive political ends through scholarly means.

“Nurturist” commitment; rejection of biological “essentialisms.”

What is the “liberationist paradigm”?

Active commitment to achieving radical or progressive political ends through scholarly means.

“Nurturist” commitment; rejection of biological “essentialisms.”

Pessimism about ability of humans to really know anything.

Robert Scholes, former president of the Modern Language Association

“We were natural for eons before we were cultural—before we were human, even—but so what? We are cultural now, and culture is the domain of the humanities.”

But . . .

A syllogism that Gottschall says we likely embrace. Yes?

The human brain is an evolved biological organ shaped by natural selection to enhance chances of survival.

The human brain produces the human mind.

Therefore, the mind exhibits the results of natural selection.

The kind of question that evolutionary psychologists ask

How did a particular psychological or behavioral trait facilitate survival and reproduction?

(In our case, we ask this question about the fact of storytelling: why did we evolve into narrators?)

Note Gottschall’s caution about perceptions of evolutionary psychology…

P. 26: “Those who know evolutionary psychology only through racy journalistic accounts, glib popular books, or the polemics of its most rhetorically gifted and indefatigable antagonists are not likely to appreciate the broad diversity of views [within the field itself].”

“Darwin was a committed evolutionary psychologist…”

“Darwin daringly contended that all of our higher powers. . . are end products of a strictly blind and purposeless churning of natural laws.”

“Darwin’s dangerous idea,” from Edward Slingerland:

Daniel Dennett,philosopher

Richard Dawkins(The Selfish Gene)

Slingerland (quoting Dennett)

“…the human mind is not a refuge of freedom and autonomy in an otherwise deterministic world, but rather ‘a huge, semi-designed, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the economy of the soul’” (256).

“If you are not disturbed and somewhat repelled, then I have not done an adequate job of explaining this material…” (257).

But biology is not the whole story…

Gottschall: “An evolutionary biology that ignores or de-emphasizes the importance of physical and sociocultural environments is, in fact, profoundly un-biological” (33).

“a new form of pluralism”

Consilient literary theory =

On MethodGottschall’s Second Chapter

Richard Moulton, 1888

“Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.”

Is there a “physical attractiveness stereotype” in literature?

Gottschall, J., et al. “Are the Beautiful Good in Western Literature? A Simple Illustration of the Necessity of Literary Quantification.” Journal of Literary Studies 23 (2007): 41-62.

“Confirmation bias” (from Francis Bacon, 1620)

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises . . . in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”

Gottschall

50: judicious use of quantitative methodology

53: addition of quantitative improves qualitative

54: literary study does deal in unquantifiable questions, but so do other human-related fields

59: graphing Jane Austen

Fighting the anti-scientific (Romantic) sensibility

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Current state of the art…

Miall, David. Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

(Gottschall, 63)

“Literary hypotheses that make testable predictions about empirical reality.”

Brian Boyd, “Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach.” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 1-23.

“A bio-cultural view offers a richer model of human nature, tested cross-culturally from hunter-gatherers to modern industrialized societies; tested comparatively, across species, within and beyond the primate and the mammalian lines; tested in real historical depth, rather than shallowly, over the millions of years that shaped the human mind and that account for the similarities between people of very different cultures; and tested in the neurophysiological terms that are now becoming available through brain imaging technology” (3).

“Looking at aspects of human nature as we move through the play, we will notice in the next scene, for instance, the stark contrast between Hamlet and the other courtiers, in dress and demeanor. This reflects something with long evolutionary roots: the ability to compare one member of one’s species with another has been demonstrated, and shown to have major behavioral implications, in creatures as neurologically primitive as guppies, and in much subtler ways in the interactions of chimpanzees with one another” (15-16).

“There is much more that an evolutionary approach to Hamlet could say. Of course much of it overlaps with a common-sense approach to the play, but it would hardly be to the advantage of an evolutionary approach if it flatly contradicted what has made the play so popular since its first performance” (18).

William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Flesch

Preface: “…narratives tend to contain or at least to suggest the possibility of three basic figures: an innocent, someone who exploits that innocent, and someone else who seeks to punish the exploiter. Humans are endowed by our evolutionary heritage with a propensity to punish those who cheat the innocent and with a propensity to cheer on other punishers. The biological origin of this propensity is part of what has come to be called the ‘evolution of cooperation,’ which provides the insights that are central to this book.”

Flesch

“Evolutionary psychologists have quite reasonably said that being able to learn through the experiences that others narrate is essential to human adaptation in a highly various and tricky world” (8).

QUESTIONS

Are we satisfied with what’s been tried?

What might be some fruitful approach-routes?

Have these critics successfully challenged the “liberationist paradigm?” (Active commitment to achieving radical or progressive political

ends through scholarly means.

“Nurturist” commitment; rejection of biological “essentialisms.”Pessimism about ability of humans to really know anything.)