Darwin, Dickens, and Dutton

Over at Arts & Letters Daily, Denis Dutton has posted his review (originally in Philosophy and Literature) of the literary critic Joseph Carroll's excellent and provocative new essay collection, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.

Dutton's summation:

[Carroll] is able to demonstrate how a knowledge of Darwinian mechanisms shines light on some of the most cherished aesthetic emotions and experiences we are capable of feeling--and he does it without impoverished reductionisms, without making the endlessly complex seem stupidly simple.

Whole thing here.

A million years ago--back in 1998--I covered a similar waterfront in the Reason story "Darwin and Dickens: A new breed of literary crtitics is using evolution to explain literature--and to challenge intellectual orthodoxy." Read all about it here. Carroll, Dutton, and others (including Robert Storey, Ellen Dissanayake, Frederick Turner, and Nancy Easterlin, to name a few) are doing very interesting stuff in this area.

Comments

[EvilIRS]

I'll post a comment. Kudos to you, Nick, for trying to bring a little culture to the joint. Why aren't there 40-60 comments up already on this story? These ingrates just don't know what's good for 'em. Maybe we can turn it into a referendum on the general incuriousness of products of American government schools.

P.S.: I didn't actually understand what you were getting at, or even check out your links, because I'm not that interested in literature, Darwinian imperative or not. You should have put a link to Celebrity Skin in there, or something about the war. Still, good job, though.

[Douglas Fletcher]

We just don't like critics, IRS, that's all.

[Chip]

I'm a poor dilettante at best in matters literary, but I seem to recall not too long ago there being a tacit academic consensus that Marx and Freud would remain the intellectual giants through whose interpretive lenses criticism would stand or fall. Nice to see Darwin getting his due.

[EvilIRS]

Chip,
You are probably thinking of the secret cabal of intellectuals whose decision it was to make sure the proles are fed a steady diet of pop-culture leftism, filtered through a matrix of Euro-Semitic sensibilities. Technically, members of the academic meritocracy are still able, for purposes of argument only, to entertain the idea that all roads do not, if fact, lead to Vienna. I sometimes make that mistake, too.

Douglas Fletcher,
So we are agreed; literary critics are to be dropped in the wilderness to be chased by bears. Those who survive will be taken somewhat seriously.

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