Lordy, the post-avant has found us. Which is sort of what Skinner's all about, but Josh Corey went to the Brussels conference and has these reactions. Interesting stuff. I hope they hang around.
In other news, the Chronicle of Higher Ed published the following piece (we'll see how long it lasts) in their August 1, 2008 issue. It shows us that the evolutionary ecocrits are taking a hard line and might not be doing well because of it. And there's some wrong-headed stuff in there (I mean, trying to see if anyone believes in the death of the author? Please. Seems to be missing the point that we don't need an biography to read a piece, and this lack of historical awareness will condemn this critic to the dustbin faster than his supposed political enemies). Anyway, the cognitive stuff is interesting and well worth paying attention to.
Snap into this slim jim quick!
Darwin to the Rescue
A group of scholars thinks evolutionary science can
reinvigorate
literary studies
By BRITT PETERSON
In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not,
prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own
demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look
to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in
the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a
study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When
the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a
quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal
attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly
one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957
Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as
well as an art?" And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to
filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and
psychoanalytic theory.
But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary
scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as
accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that,
while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no
time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere
which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of
gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged." Over
the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to
encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very
loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the
Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary
patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance
and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against
30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism
and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times
Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe's Ideas page, where
Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an
adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why
the approach is for him, as he says, "the way and the light."
His comments have been receiving widespread attention in the
blogosphere, perhaps because they touch a nerve: The idea that traditional
literary studies are in decline, or already dead, is bandied about almost casually now. The symptoms are legion,
from the discussion of books as an old technology to the tight job market and
the increasing reliance on adjunct labor in the humanities. And, like
Gottschall, many academics see literary theory as an alienating force that has driven students away from their disciplines, and
splintered the disciplines to the point, sometimes, of outright war.
Nonetheless, many literary scholars are skeptical of the idea that Literary Darwinism will save their sector of the academy.
And some of the strongest criticism comes from those you might think would be
allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics
breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even,
in a few cases, empirical method. Literary Darwinists are "a very small
group of people that position themselves as martyrs for the cause … because
they expect to be berated by everyone else in the field," says Lisa
Zunshine, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, who works with cognitive approaches to
understanding literature. "But, in spite of the publicity that they're
getting, I don't see that they're actually attracting so many people."
Literary Darwinists beg to differ. Gottschall's Globe
article is a bracing manifesto, outlining the sad state of the literary academy
and pointing to scientific method as the only life raft in sight.
"Literature professors should apply science's research
methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis
and proof," he writes. "The alternative is to let literary study keep
withering away." He provides two demonstrations of his approach. The first
is a study just published in the journal Human Nature, in which he collects
accounts of beauty in fairy tales from around the world to test whether Western
tales place an extraordinary importance on female beauty. The second is a comparison of reactions from
"500 literary scholars and avid readers" to characters from
19th-century British novels to gauge whether the author is truly dead — in
other words, whether the meaning of a text is derived primarily from each
reader's particular experience, as cultural theory has had it.
The subjects of the two experiments are not accidental.
Literary Darwinism conceives of itself as the primary opposition to cultural
theory in all its forms: Marxism, poststructuralism, Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth. In the Literary Darwinist mind-set,
cultural theory — subjective, deliberately obtuse, politicized, based on
outmoded assumptions — is the disease that's stricken the academy, and
scientific rigor is the cure. "Most of the big ideas in literary theory
have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no
life in psychology anymore — it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no
life really in political theory or in economics classrooms," Gottschall says.
"My point is, we start with these bad theories, and work founded on faulty
premises is going to be faulty itself." Of course, the tests he cites in
his Globe article find both the feminist critique of the Western tradition as
having a unique focus on beauty and the poststructuralist idea of the
"death of the author" to be false. (Not all Literary Darwinists
subscribe to Gottschall's reliance on qualitative study; others treat
scientific ideas more as a theoretical frame for reading than as a guide to
method.)
Literary Darwinism is also garnering attention because it
joins evolutionary-minded scholarship in various fields. Scholars like
Gottschall; Joseph Carroll, of the University of Missouri at St. Louis; and the Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd, of the University
of Auckland, have found much common ground with evolutionary psychologists. The
2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), by
Steven Pinker, an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard
University, reads like a companion piece to Gottschall's and Carroll's
writings: "The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th
century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting
art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're
surprised people are staying away in droves?" In a review last year in
Philosophy and Literature of the seminal Literary Darwinist anthology, The
Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern University
Press, 2005), edited by Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at the
State University of New York at Binghamton, Pinker wrote that, despite several
methodological concerns, he found the book "exciting." He added,
"It isn't often that one can be present at the genesis of a new field of
knowledge."
But Literary Darwinists have been far less welcomed by
mainstream literary theorists. Referring to the theory of the unity of
scientific and literary knowledge in E.O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The
Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Louis Menand, a professor of
English at Harvard, wrote in 2005 that humanities departments "should
definitely not want consilience, which is a bargain with the devil." While
scientists have criticized the methods Gottschall uses in his experiments as
not very scientific, literary scholars have often claimed that the concerns of
Literary Darwinism are less than literary. Natalia Cecire, a literary blogger
and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote an
impassioned denunciation: "For a literary critic, Gottschall seems
alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do." Taking issue with
his finding that Western society is not alone in its sexism, she charged,
"I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of 'scholars'
(plural) who have said that. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics." The
Literary Darwinists expect and almost court that type of dismissal. The scholars tend to see themselves as outsiders:
denied jobs at prestigious universities, tenured positions, and grant money
because of the iconoclastic nature of their work. Gottschall is still an
adjunct, and he says he believes that no one of a "principally Darwinian
bent" has tenure, except for those who originally started down a more-traditional
path. "It is true that we are promoting views that seem disturbingly alien
or threatening to most of the professors who serve on hiring committees, editorial boards, and who
comprise the main pool of peer reviewers," he says. Carroll says that he
is "looking forward" to the day when he can just "get down and
do the work," instead of being forced to constantly explain and defend his
approach.
Still, both Gottschall and Carroll are sure that their ideas
will eventually gain mainstream credibility. Carroll talks about Literary
Darwinism's exerting a "carrot and stick" influence on the literary
academy: "The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more
beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that
they're going to feel that here's something new to do." Gottschall adds:
"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth,
will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their
studies. And there will probably be resistance against it too, but again, I
have confidence in the ideas, and I think they'll win out."
A less-expected attack, however, comes from similarly
marginalized scholars who, like Kentucky's Zunshine, study related fields like
cognitive theory and empirical literary research. Like the Literary Darwinists,
such scholars, to varying degrees, work at the juncture of literary theory and
scientific methods. Those who turn to cognitive theory fit into several
different subfields, including literary critics who use empirical data,
collaborating with neuroscientists and experimental psychologists to study the connections between
brain function and reading. Some adherents, like Nancy Easterlin, of the
University of New Orleans, draw both on cognitive theory and evolutionary
psychology in their work. Easterlin works with a broad assortment of
approaches, including Darwinist-based feminism and what she calls
"cognitive ecocriticism." It is the pro-science literary scholars who
don't use evolutionary psychology who tend to be the most skeptical that the
Literary Darwinists will succeed in transforming literary studies forever.
For some of the literary scholars who use cognitive science,
that is because their background incorporates cultural theory as well as
science, and they're wary of junking 30 years of new thinking. F. Elizabeth
Hart, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut who
has a background in Renaissance literature and an interest in how cognitive
theory affects, for example, conceptions of metaphor, says she mistrusts an
approach that so de-emphasizes the effect of culture on the individual. "We have to find a
theory that creates or explains or allows for an interface between the
individual as an agent and the — to use a Marxist phrase — superstructure that
bears down on the individual. You have to have a model that accounts for
both," she says. Zunshine accuses the Literary Darwinists of
"throwing the baby out with the bathwater. … It's somewhat ridiculous to
say that scientific method can help us to shed light on all of the questions
that literary theory has been engaged with."
The Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti, now at Stanford
University, isn't in the field of cognitive literary studies, but his work
frequently gets lumped in with the empiricists because of its particularly
scientific and mathematical nature. He has been writing about the connections
between evolution and literary theory for many years. He reiterates in an
e-mail message the argument that Literary Darwinism doesn't address literary
form, that it's concerned with external issues that avoid literature's literary
nature: "If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand
and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it
eludes form, or just doesn't 'see' it, then it will mean exactly nothing."
Joseph P. Tabbi, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at
Chicago who studies the intersections between cognitive theory and 20th-century
literature, says of Gottschall's fairy-tales experiment: "If you're
interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of
stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need
to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and
questions that fall into the category of narratology. I'm not sure that by
taking samples and doing statistical processing that you're going to get very
far." D.T. Max, the author of the New York Times Magazine article, got at
that objection when he wrote, "I don't think even by stretching one's
imagination primates evoke 'The Waste Land' or 'Finnegan's Wake.' Tone, point
of view, reliability of the narrator — these are literary tropes that often
elude Literary Darwinists."
And still others attack the Literary Darwinists on the other
flank, prying apart their scientific credentials. While some who call
themselves Literary Darwinists do have a scientific background — and several
scientists wrote articles for The Literary Animal, including E.O. Wilson — many
in the group have no background in statistics or evolutionary biology, and they
frequently work alone instead of in groups with scientists, unlike many of the
cognitive theorists and empirical literary critics. (Carroll said that he
recently gave himself "a crash course" in statistical analysis, but
neither he nor Gottschall has any official training.) Alan Richardson, an
English professor at Boston College who works with cognitive theory, writes in
an e-mail message that the work he's seen from the evolutionary literary
theorists "is riddled with basic errors in study design and
methodology."
David Miall, a professor of English and film studies at the
University of Alberta who teams up with a psychologist to perform empirical
studies of reader response to texts, says that, with the Literary Darwinists,
"what you've got is just another way of coming up with interpretations of
texts, and I'm not sure we need that, so urgently … unless they really have
something new to tell us about the nature of the text. And if there is
something new, there should be a way of validating it empirically. So in that
sense, their resistance to doing empirical studies seems to be a real
disability. It's disappointing that they don't go to that next stage."
Miall's recommendation would be to test empirically whether readers are
actually influenced to think about the mating strategies and other evolutionary
patterns that the Darwinists read into the works they examine.
Both Gottschall and Carroll are used to responding to such
critiques and do so pre-emptively in most of their publications. In an upcoming
issue of the journal Style, Carroll will take on some 30 scholars about various
aspects of Literary Darwinism. As for the question of whether its approach can
fully get at literary problems, Gottschall writes in his forthcoming book,
Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan): "I suspect
that there will always be vital humanities questions that deflect every tool
and device in science's organon. Moreover, I do not mean to hint that sound
qualitative studies cannot help us generate more reliable knowledge."
Gottschall's essay in The Literary Animal also includes an
extended defense of using quantitative methods for literary studies, alleging
that, over the history of human knowledge, many fields (including medicine and
sociology) have resisted the importation of statistical analysis:
"Critically, the point is not that investigators in these fields
eventually discovered that everything could be reduced to numbers after all.
Rather, they came to realize that quantitative and qualitative tools were both
utterly indispensable for a reasonably complete exploration of their fields,
each set of tools being appropriate for different types of questions." (Despite
that conciliatory stance in print, however, in person Gottschall often seems to
be choking back a complete denunciation of traditional literary studies, saying
qualifiedly, "I'm not quite calling for total disciplinary annihilation
and genocide.")
The proponents of Literary Darwinism have also taken on the
question of its scientific rigor. Carroll says, "A lot of people do say
that, and one of the responses to it is that people who say that haven't read
most of the stuff they're rejecting." Gottschall points out that much of
his writing has been published in scientific journals. He admits, however, that
under the name of Literary Darwinism "there's also a lot of crap. There
really has been a lot of crap. Now the question is, what does that prove? Does it really prove that
it's futile and jihadist and all of that? Or does it prove that we need to do a
better job? Because you can also go out and find hugely depressing lists of
problems in quantitative approaches."
As to whether Literary Darwinism will save literary
criticism, opinions are split there too. Indeed, other scholars of scientific
theory and empiricist research seem far less morbid on the subject than
Gottschall and Carroll. Many see the numbers increasing in their own
specialties; it's not unusual to hear stories about scholars in the field of
cognitive theory and literary studies, for example, who have been laboring in
isolation for decades now getting greater recognition from their colleagues,
professional institutions, and academic publishers. For them the future looks
far brighter than it seems for the evolutionary literary theorists, perhaps
because the field of cognitive studies outside the literary sphere is so hot.
Zunshine, in fact, sees Literary Darwinism as a force that could add to the joblessness
and hopelessness of students and professors, instead of vice versa: "Say I
am a professor of English, I have graduate students, and I tell them: You have
to forget about everything that your colleagues have been working on for the
last 30 years because it's all literary theory, it's all wrong, and now you
have this new scientific approach that you use. Now let me ask you, what would
happen if a graduate student who hears this goes on the job market?"
Even mainstream scholars who have proclaimed the end of
literary studies are wary of the solution offered by Literary Darwinism.
William Deresiewicz, a former associate professor of English at Yale
University, wrote a gloomy article in The Nation that is frequently cited as
evidence of the apocalypse by Gottschall. Deresiewicz says, "This is not
to say that some of those methods can't be useful; I'm not going to make an a
priori statement like that. But I worry that they proceed from a failure or an
unwillingness to recognize or see that science and literature represent
different areas of knowledge."
Andrew Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia
University and author of the 1999 New York Review of Books article "The
Decline and Fall of Literature," calls his attitude "cautiously open
skepticism. The kind of reductionist stuff that I could imagine coming out of
this would seem to me to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. But I don't
think one should close one's mind to it."
For the Literary Darwinists, however, the urgency is so high
that they see their work, whatever its flaws, as the literary academy's last,
best hope — if, of course, it has the courage to embrace the inevitable.
"We're desperate," says Gottschall. "The field is really, really
desperate. Morale is so bad. No one really knows what to do. Everyone is saying
what I am, in some way — they have the same critique, the same feeling that our
old ways are just plain spent. "But when it comes down to how to solve
these problems, how to win back relevance and consequence in the world, how to
secure a place for the discipline in the future, people are pretty timid about
these more aggressive solutions."
Britt Peterson is assistant managing editor of The New
Republic.
________________________________________
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 47, Page B7
