Cohen, Patricia. "Next Big Thing in English." NEW YORK TIMES March 31, 2010.

Now English professors and graduate students . . . say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read? . . . At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift. Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing. The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.” Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories. Interest has bloomed during the last decade. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html?emc=eta1.

Deresiewicz, William. "Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism." NATION May 20, 2009.

The appeal of evolutionary psychology is easy to grasp. Just think of Annie Hall. The last few decades have left us so profoundly disoriented about the most urgent personal matters--gender roles, sexual norms, the possibility of creating lasting romantic relationships, not to mention absolutely everything to do with family structure--that it's no surprise to find people embracing a theory that promises to restore order. Once we had religion to tell us who we are. Then, for a while, we had Freud. Now we have evolutionary psychology, which, as an attempt to construct a science of human nature on Darwinian principles, marshals two of the most powerful ideas in contemporary culture: science, our most authoritative way of knowing, and nature, our highest ground of moral appeal. No wonder the field is catnip to journalists and armchair theorists alike. Equip yourself with a few basic concepts--natural selection, inclusive fitness, mating choice--and you, too, can explain the mysteries of human existence. That evolutionary psychology has no real intellectual credibility, that mainstream biology regards it as a house of sand, rarely seems to come up. EP is the Malcolm Gladwell of science: facile and glib, but so persuasive and charming that no one wants to ruin the fun. To be fair, the problem lies less in the field's goals than in its claims. Much of its opposition is misguided and out-of-date. For a long time, evolutionary approaches to human behavior were discredited by the specter of Social Darwinism. More recently, the concept of a unitary human nature has been condemned as a form of bourgeois universalism--that is, of disguised ethnocentrism. But those who reject the notion of human psychology as a product of evolution (that is, of nature rather than culture) would undoubtedly recoil at the idea that human physiology is not a product of evolution. The only alternative is creationism. And if our bodies have evolved, then so have our minds, which a materialist philosophy (one that doesn't depend on supernatural entities like the Christian soul) must regard as products of our bodies--of our brains, nerves, sense organs and so forth. Surely no one would dispute that there is a universal bee nature or dog nature or chimpanzee nature. Why not then acknowledge, at least in principle, a universal human nature, however various its elaborations in culture? The question is, What does it consist of, how did it arise and can we discover it? Here is where evolutionary psychology falls down. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/deresiewicz/single?rel=nofollow.

Cfp: "Decodings," 23rd Annual Conference, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Atlanta, November 5-8, 2009.

The conference theme is "decodings," with all its possible referents, including: Do we decode nature, or are natural processes already full of encoding/decoding mechanisms along the lines of DNA? Is a digital representation a decoding of analog nature, or must we decode the digital to understand what is lost in quantizing natural continua? We invite panels, individual papers and artistic presentations on these or related topics, but will give full consideration to any panel or proposal within SLSA's scope. For further information, visit the society's conference page: http://www.litsci.org/slsa09/.

Pub: Boyd, Brian. ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES: EVOLUTION, COGNITION AND FICTION. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.

A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects—anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics, culture, and art. Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love. Art is a specifically human adaptation, Boyd argues. It offers tangible advantages for human survival, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among more intelligent animals. More particularly, our fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity. After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. What triggers our emotional engagement with these works? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience’s attention, Boyd underscores, is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Boyd’s study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

Morton, Brian. "It's the Greatest Show on Earth." OBSERVER March 8, 2009.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. The peacock's tail gave Darwin considerable grief. A single feather made him feel "sick". The bird's cumbersome display seemed to confound the guiding principle of natural selection: that any evolved form should answer fittedness to environment. Not until his last book, The Descent of Man, did he come up with a satisfactory answer based on "natural selection in relation to sex". Even in his final years, Darwin had little to say about aesthetics but his theory of evolution does prepare the way for a comprehensive understanding of what art is and why we make it. Denis Dutton's title is also his conclusion. In 250 elegant pages, he demonstrates that aesthetics are linked at the profoundest level to our biological and cognitive prehistory, and that our "tastes" - those famously wavering and manipulable urges - emerged in the Pleistocene, and haven't changed in essentials since then. For Dutton, cultural relativism is an academic parlour game. Human arts speak to a universal human nature different only in plumage. This is an interpretation that runs counter to the view - held by Stephen Jay Gould among others - that art is merely the by-product of an over-sized brain and should be excluded from the natural selection rulebook. Evolutionary biologists have argued that human emotions emerged as a mechanism for orchestrating specific biological needs, harmonising potential actions in a useful way. Fear is a way of getting the body prepared for potential dangers. When risk and therefore fear are no longer aspects of day-to-day survival - no sabre-tooths on Hampstead Heath! - fear remains with us as an objectless emotion, and evolution leads smoothly on to Hammer House of Horror. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/08/art-instinct-brian-morton-review.

Hsu, Jeremy. "Why Dead Authors Can Thrill Modern Readers." LIVE SCIENCE April 15, 2009.

Classic stories still retain their storytelling power centuries later, and smart remakes do well to retain much of the original plot. That's the case in a new literary mash-up, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," where Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy take time away from courtship to hone their martial arts skills on the walking dead – a twist welcomed by both critics and "Janeite" fans of British author Jane Austen. Such fascination with stories has compelled a small group of researchers to mine theories in evolutionary biology and psychology, in hopes of finding a connection between storytelling and the evolved human mind. Most agree that stories represent products of humanity's highly social existence, but debate rages over whether stories themselves may have evolved as an adaptation or social byproduct. Their early findings could help explain why the best stories endure, and why remakes can find success despite seemingly retreading old ground. After all, Austen and other beloved storytellers may have found the sweet spot in tickling the social sensibilities of a modern mind not far removed from early Homo sapiens, let alone 19th-century British society. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.livescience.com/culture/090415-zombie-austen.html.

Gottlieb, Anthony. "The Descent of Taste." NEW YORK TIMES January 29, 2009.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, and the founder and editor of a popular Web site, Arts & Letters Daily. The ideas that are his starting point come from a form of evolutionary psychology that began to catch on in the 1990s. When you hear it claimed that some bit of human behavior is explained by the fact that we are genetically hard-wired to succeed and breed in a Stone Age environment, that — in its crudest, popularized form — is evolutionary psychology. Its terrain is full of pitfalls, and I suspect that Darwin would have been skeptical of it. We know so little about the environment of our Pleistocene ancestors, what they were like, and how they lived, that almost any hypothesis about which strategies might have helped them to reproduce, and thus let their characteristics ripple through the gene pool, is bound to be highly speculative. In addition, the story told by mainstream evolutionary psychology may both start too late and stop too early. When Darwin himself ventured into psychology, with his study of the expression of emotions, he cast his net far wider and looked at the distant common ancestors that humans share with other species. If he was right to do so, the origins of some human psychology may be older than the Stone Age. And evolution is now reckoned to be capable of working faster than was thought in the 1990s: it may well be that the wiring of our minds continues to develop. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Gottlieb-t.html?_r=1&ref=review.

O'Donnell, Michael. Review of Dennis Dutton's THE ART INSTINCT. BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW December 31, 2008.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, an elegant, slim, forcefully argued piece of scholarship, is in many ways the natural next step in a contrarian career. Dutton is an American expatriate living in New Zealand, where he teaches aesthetics and philosophy. He is infamous in many ports, not least for his hilarious Bad Writing Contest, which shamed humanities departments by spotlighting the most impenetrable, jargon-laden sentences in academic journals. But he is best known for founding the indispensable web site Arts & Letters Daily, which assembles news and magazine articles that meet a single criterion: making a good case. The pieces range widely, from analyzing George Bush's nostrils to puzzling over the dearth of Protestants living in Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Hours surrender to the site like tokens to a gumball machine. Dutton has excellent taste. And a good thing, too, because The Art Instinct is an exploration of human taste. The book's provocative thesis is that our propensity for creating music, literature, drama, and the visual arts is the product of Darwinian evolution, and that our taste in art arises not from cultural indicators but from universal, innate preferences. This argument doesn't come from out of nowhere -- Dutton openly builds upon and complements the work of linguist Steven Pinker, for one -- but the book advances it aggressively and persuasively, even if many questions remain. The Art Instinct also undercuts some fundamental premises in disciplines like cultural studies and anthropology. Expect some nasty reviews. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=20751503.

Fulford, Robert. "Showing Off the Life of the Mind." NATIONAL POST December 30, 2008.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Dutton's interest in cultural evolution began in the 1960s when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in India. As a student he had absorbed (and partially accepted) the academic belief that cultures are so sealed off from each other that cross-cultural understanding is all but impossible; art is "socially constructed," the product of a certain time and place, nothing else. That suggests to many scholars that attempting to see connections between cultures amounts to a form of colonialism. But in rural India, Dutton changed his mind. He discovered that the hopes, fears and vices of the Indians were altogether intelligible to a twentysomething graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara. And much of the cultural life of India was equally graspable. In Hyderabad he learned the sitar from a student of Ravi Shankar and found Indian music no more remote from Western music than 17th-century Italian madrigals are from the harmonies of Duke Ellington: "The lure of rhythmic drive, harmonic anticipation, lucid structure and divinely sweet melody cuts across cultures with ease." How could this be? Were these cultures somehow connected at their roots? . . . Get the answer here: http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=1e575d03-385b-4190-a32d-5b2949bd830c.

Gotschall, Jonathan. "Hidden Histories." BOSTON GLOBE September 28, 2008.

Reconstructing a prehistoric world from literary sources is rife with complications. But there are aspects of life in the Homeric era upon which most scholars agree. Homer paints a coherent picture of Greek attitudes, ideology, customs, manners, and mores that is consistent with the 8th century archeological record, and holds together based on anthropological knowledge about societies at similar levels of cultural development. For instance, we can trust that the Greeks' political organization was loose but not chaotic - probably organized at the level of chiefdoms, not kingdoms or city-states. In the epics we can see the workings of an agrarian economy; we can see what animals they raised and what crops, how they mixed their wine, worshipped their gods, and treated their slaves and women. We can tell that theirs was a warlike world, with high rates of conflict within and between communities. This violence, in fact, opens an important window onto that world. Patterns of violence in Homer are intriguingly consistent with societies on the anthropological record known to have suffered from acute shortages of women. While Homeric men did not take multiple wives, they hoarded and guarded slave women who they treated as their sexual property. These women were mainly captured in raids of neighboring towns, and they appear frequently in Homer. In the poems, Odysseus is mentioned as having 50 slave women, and it is slave women who bear most of King Priam's 62 children. For every slave woman working a rich man's loom and sharing his bed, some less fortunate or formidable man lacks a wife. In pre-state societies around the world - from the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin to the tribes of highland New Guinea to the Inuit of the Arctic - a scarcity of women almost invariably triggers pitched competition among men, not only directly over women, but also over the wealth and social status needed to win them. This is exactly what we find in Homer. Homeric men fight over many different things, but virtually all of the major disputes center on rights to women - not only the famous conflict over Helen, but also over the slave girls Briseis and Chryseis, Odysseus's wife Penelope, and all the nameless women of common Trojan men. As the old counselor Nestor shouts to the Greek hosts, "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward until after he has lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan!" . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/09/28/hidden_histories/?page=full.

Peterson, Britt. "Darwin to the Rescue." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION August 1, 2008

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." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i47/47b00701.htm.

Gotschall, Jonathan. "Measure for Measure." BOSTON GLOBE May 11, 2008.

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders. I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/measure_for_measure/.