Thoughts for the Day

Literary Darwinism, all things Darwin

“It is all too easy to foresee a future for literary criticism of MRI machines and statistical charts. (Finally, something the rest of the university can relate to!) English departments will turn themselves over to brain scans just as they turned themselves over to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that future arrives, what will the classroom look like? Will it be a new gaudy lecture room where Brian Boyd, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on Consilience, tells you that “We may compare Lear’s rage with the fury of an alpha male chimpanzee deposed from dominance, or note the sudden spike in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in animals that suffer loss in rank”? That really would be the death of humanism, not to mention the English major. Even if literary Darwinism were grounded in real science, it could never replace the subjective encounter with a text that lies at the heart of all reading and should lie at the heart of all pedagogy and all criticism. It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is the nature of literature itself. That interpretation succeeds interpretation in a seemingly endless cycle is not a weakness of criticism but its essential strength. The great works persist because they have the power, in every age, to make us ask the most important questions, which are the ones that have no answers, or rather, that have only personal answers: What are we doing here? What does it feel like to be alive? What should we do with our time on earth?”

From an excellent article in The Nation, Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism by William Deresiewicz. Read the whole article, it touches on all things Darwin: Evolutionary Psycology, Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Neurosciece from creativity to human dignity and transcendence.