Joseph Carroll
(314) 432-5583
carrolljc@msx.umsl.edu
UNIVERSALS
IN LITERARY STUDY
From the time of Aristotle until the late eighteenth
century, most literary theorists believed that literature represented universal
realities or gave expression to universal truths. The belief in universals has
been based on two distinct philosophical orientations, the naturalistic and the
transcendental. Transcendental theorists postulate absolute spiritual
realities--ultimate forms of beauty and truth--and argue that literary works
gain access to those ultimate realities. Naturalistic theorists postulate a
common human nature--a structure of motives, cognitive processes, and emotions
that are common to all people--and they argue that literary works represent
that common human nature. The naturalistic conception of universals has had the
deepest and most widespread influence on literary theory, and it is almost
inescapably implied by literary practice. In respect to the idea of a common
human nature, naturalism and transcendentalism are not necessarily
incompatible, and transcendental theorists have sometimes also been, in this
respect, naturalistic. At present, naturalism is the only orientation in which
theorists are actively developing the theory of literary universals. Most
contemporary proponents of literary universals are Darwinians. They argue that the
universal characteristics of human nature have been produced by an adaptive
process of natural selection, and they seek an understanding of human nature in
evolutionary disciplines such as ethology, sociobiology, and evolutionary
psychology.
Two main schools of thought have challenged the idea of
literary universals: philosophic particularism and historicism. Philosophic
particularism is the belief that every moment of perception is unique and
irreducible, and that the only regularity is flux. This belief has roots both
in ancient Heraclitean philosophy and in the empirical English philosophy of
the eighteenth century, but it became a major component of literary theory only
in the late nineteenth century. Philosophic particularism enters into the
closely related literary movements of aestheticism, decadence, and symbolism,
and through these movements it had a major impact on modernist literature in
the first half of the twentieth century. Historicism is the belief that human
experience and literary expression can be radically modified by differences of
cultural context. The historicism that arose in the later eighteenth century
and that pervades nineteenth-century cultural theory is largely developmental
and progressivist. The order of cultural change is sometimes attributed to the
developmental design of human nature, and in this form historicism is itself a
theory of a universal human design. The ?New Historicism@ that has
emerged in the past twenty years, and that currently dominates Anglophone
literary theory, repudiates human universals. The New Historicists subscribe to
the deconstructive doctrine that all experience is wholly constituted by verbal
forms and cultural constructs, and they treat all historical change as
discontinuous and non-progressive.
In the first part of this article, I shall give some
illustrative instances of naturalistic universalism, transcendental
universalism, philosophic particularism, and historicism. In the second part, I
shall examine the effort to make sense of universals within the Darwinian
framework.
UNIVERSALISTS,
PARTICULARISTS, AND HISTORICISTS
Aristotle is the chief classical exemplar of a
naturalistic conception of literary universals. In his Poetics he
maintains both that the impulse toward literary representation and the
represented content of literature are universal. Representation is a form of ?imitation,@ and the
impulse toward imitation is Arooted in human nature@ (47). In a
passage that has been very frequently quoted as a defense of literary meaning,
he contrasts the literal particularity of historical writing with the typical
or representative character of literature. Literature, he claims, ?is a more
philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends rather to
express the universal, history rather the particular fact@ (54).
The
writers of the neo-classical period in Europe and England--the later
seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth century--refine and complete the
classical version of the naturalistic conception of literary universals. The
import of their work can be exemplified by a passage from Samuel Johnson.
Probably the single most frequently cited formulation of a neo-classical aesthetic
creed is that which Johnson gives to his spokesman, the poet Imlac, in the
philosophical novel Rasselas. Johnson=s creed is both
naturalistic and transcendental. That is, he appeals both to human nature and
to a divinely sanctioned order of moral truth. Imlac declares that ?the province of
poetry is to describe Nature and Passion, which are always the same@ (39-40). The
poet=s purpose must
be ?to examine, not
the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large
appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the
different shades in the verdure of the forest@ (43). Johnson
recognizes that the forms of experience are modified by changes of time and
cultural circumstance, but he believes that beneath all variations the same
motives and passions are at work. The poet must ?estimate the
happiness and misery of every condition; observe the power of all the passions
in all their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind as they are
modified by various institutions and accidental influences of climate or custom@ (44). The
elementary passions and motives are essential components of a universal design;
changes of culture and climate are merely ?accidents,@ that is,
superficial or adventitious modifications of the design. Thus far, Johnson=s formulation
closely parallels the views of evolutionary psychologists, but Johnson has no
suspicion of the evolutionary basis for the species-typical human design, and
his classical naturalistic conception orients itself instead to a
transcendental morality. The poet, Imlac says, ?must divest
himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and
wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws
and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always
be the same@ (44).
In Johnson=s thinking, the
elementary human passions are closely connected with moral realities that are
universal and accessible to enlightened reason. In another form of
transcendental theory, the passions and the senses are taken to be part of the
lower, animal nature of humanity, and this lower nature is set in stern
opposition to the supposedly divine powers of reason and will. If, within this
dualistic conception of human nature, the theorist associates literature with
the lower nature, the senses and feelings, he will regard literature with deep
moral suspicion. It is thus that Plato chooses to banish poets from the ideal
republic, and similar motives animated the English Puritans in shutting the
Elizabethan theaters. Plato believes in beauty and good as absolutes, but he
does not believe that literature, concerned as it is with flux and the surface
of things, can gain access to this absolute good.
In contrast to Plato, transcendental writers of a
Romantic bent take literature and the literary imagination as the central means
of access to absolute beauty or good. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance,
declares that Ato be a poet is to apprehend the true and the
beautiful, in a word, the good. . . . A poet participates in the eternal, the
infinite, and the one@ (123-24). In Romantic theorists,
transcendentalism is often combined with a naturalistic appeal to a common
human nature. Thus, Shelley argues that poetry represents actions in accordance
with Athe
unchangeable forms of human nature@(128). And
William Wordsworth argues that poetry traces Athe primary
laws of our nature,@ and especially Athe essential
passions of the heart@ (447). Wordsworth thinks that poetry
both represents and appeals to ?our elementary feelings@ (447). Though
the Romantics emphasize fervor of composition and response rather than
objectivity of representation, formulations of this sort recall the
neoclassical formulations of Samuel Johnson, and they anticipate Victorian reaffirmations
of a classical universalism. The most prominent Victorian literary theorist,
Matthew Arnold, simultaneously invokes Aristotle and echoes Wordsworth. He
declares that the purpose of dramatic poetry is to depict actions, and he
identifies the most excellent actions as those ?which most
powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary
feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of
time@ (4).
In the twentieth century, the most prominent theorist of
literary universals has been Northrop Frye. Like his Romantic predecessors Frye
invokes both transcendental and naturalistic versions of universals. The best
known aspect of Frye=s literary theory is the cyclical
seasonal taxonomy of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye associates
each of four major genres with a season: spring with the romance quest, summer
with romantic comedy, fall with tragedy, and winter with irony and realism.
Frye links each of these phases with a set of character types, plot situations,
and tonal perspectives. Each type has mythic antecedents or archetypes, and the
types serve to categorize both specific individual works and whole cultural
periods. Frye=s sources include Jung=s theory of
psychological archetypes as innate mental forms derived from inherited
ancestral experience, but the most comprehensive framework for his theory is a
Platonic conception of transcendent ideal forms. He argues that at the highest
level, the ?anagogic@ or spiritual
level, all of the archetypal forms merge into a single spiritual absolute, ?a single
infinite and eternal verbal symbol@ (121).
In the mid-century period, Frye was widely esteemed the
most creative and authoritative among modern literary theorists, but his
prestige has now faded. Archetypal myth criticism flourished in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies but has had very few recent proponents. From the
nineteen-forties through the nineteen-sixties, a large proportion of Anglophone
literary critics cherished beliefs, similar to Frye=s, about the
transcendent nature of the poetic symbol, but the Derridean deconstructionists
who came into prominence in the nineteen-seventies gleefully repudiated
transcendentalism, and the general ideological temper of recent theory has been
subversive, not reverential.
In both its transcendental and naturalistic forms, the
idea of literary universals sets itself in dialectical opposition to the idea
of literary particulars. This opposition can be conceived either invidiously,
as a contrast between the better and the worse, or as a complementary
relationship between interdependent poles of representation.
Invidious oppositions can favor either universals or
particulars, though the proponents of universals have been more numerous.
Invidious universalist conceptions are apparent in the contrast that Aristotle
makes between poetry and history, in the contrast that Johnson makes between
the essential structure of unchanging human passions and the merely accidental
variations of climates, and customs. Invidious proponents of particularity
include advocates of ?realism@ in fiction.
Ian Watt, for instance, identifies the novel as the paradigmatic realist form,
and he presents it as an integral part of ?that vast
transformation of Western civilisation since the Renaissance which has replaced
the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different
one--one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned
aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular
times and at particular places@ (31). Watt=s historical
vision consists in a simple progression from Platonic transcendentalism through
British empiricism. The one British writer who most forcibly articulates an
extreme philosophic particularism, the critic and novelist Walter Pater, offers
a more complex account of philosophical history. Pater sets his own vision in
contrast to that of Plato, but he also affiliates himself with the ancient
Heraclitean and Epicurean philosophy. Pater=s particularism
is both ultra-individualistic and ultra-atomistic. He speaks of each ?individual in
his isolation,@ and he insists that ?those
impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles
down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that
as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all
that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it@ (The Renaissance,
187-88).
Pater=s particularism takes extreme form only
in his earlier work. In his later work, he offers a more balanced account of
the complementary interaction between particulars and universals, and in this
more balanced account he rejoins the mainstream of modern European literary
theory. Schiller=s distinction between ?naive@ and ?sentimental@ poetry offers
an exemplary instance of this mainstream tradition. Assimilating previous
formulations of the distinction between ancient and modern literature, Schiller
holds that naive poetry, associated with pagan antiquity, is objective,
sensual, concrete, action-oriented, and particularistic. Sentimental poetry,
associated with modern European poetry, is subjective, reflective, abstract,
meditative and synthetic. Schiller=s theory had a
direct influence on the literary theory of Carl Jung, who invokes Schiller=s dichotomy and
links it with extraversion and introversion, the primary polar terms of his
theory of personality. Northrop Frye follows in the same tradition and adapts
it to a generic distinction between the novel, which is supposedly realistic
and extraverted, and the romance, which is symbolic and introverted. ?The romancer
does not attempt to create >real people= so much as
stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes@ (304). The
English poet and theorist Robert Browning formulates a dichotomy similar to
Schiller=s and fashions
it into a dialectic intended to describe the laws of development in all
literary traditions. In one phase, Browning argues, poets seek new material
from the concrete particulars of contemporary reality, and in a succeeding
phase they organize this new material within a total imaginative synthesis. The
dialectic progresses as an expansive spiral, not merely cycling through the
phases of the dialectic but using it to increase the range of poetic
representation.
In the later eighteenth century, cultural historians
began attempting to take account of the differences of imaginative life in
differing periods of history. Before the publication of
Most historicists presuppose some continuity in the
ground-plan of human nature. They nonetheless tacitly allow for some level at
which basic cognitive and emotional processes and basic social interactions can
be compared. In their programmatic statements, however, they tend to emphasize
the differences between their own views and the more strongly universalist bias
of neo-classical writers. Hippolyte Taine offers an instructive instance. Taine
is a naturalistic historicist who was influenced by
They thought men of every race and
century were all but identical; the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the man
of the Restoration, and the man of the eighteenth century, as if they had been
turned out of a common mould; and all in conformity to a certain abstract
conception, which served for the whole human race. They knew man, but not men;
they had not penetrated to the soul; they had not seen the infinite diversity
and marvelous complexity of souls; they did not know that the moral
constitution of a people or an age is as particular and distinct as the
physical structure of a family of plants or an order of animals. (5)
In practice, the historicists do in fact give more
sensitive attention to the peculiarities of period and culture, but at the
level of theoretical formulation, Taine=s contrast is
too sharply drawn. Recall the representative neo-classical formulation of
universals in Samuel Johnson=s Rasselas. Johnson declares
that ?Nature and
Passion@are ?always the
same,@ but he also
argues that the poet must ?trace the changes of the human mind as
they are modified by various institutions and accidental influences of climate
or custom.@ Moreover, Taine himself compares various distinct
cultures by analyzing differences in the way certain common motives and
cognitive processes operate among different races and at different periods.
In the twentieth century, the teleological progressivism
of historicist cultural theory has remained alive in its Marxist versions, but
the effort of writers like Herder and Hegel to construct a comprehensive
rationale, intrinsic to the historical process, for every phase of cultural history,
has long been abandoned. The Darwinian vision of biological change in
evolutionary time as a mechanical process directed to no particular end has
discouraged large-scale transcendental conceptions. The sentiments and
assumptions animating Victorian visions of a necessary progress leading to ?the solidarity
of mankind@ and ?the perfection
of our race@ were dissolved and scattered in the cataclysm of
the First World War (Eliot, 428). In the last two decades of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth, many social thinkers and
literary artists assimilated the Darwinian vision, particularly the social
Darwinists and the naturalists. Presumably, a biologically based social science
would eventually have had further ramifications in literary theory, but after
the first decade of the current century the social sciences turned sharply
against any association with Darwinism. The idea of cultural autonomy became
the cornerstone of standard social science, and until the 1970s Darwinism essentially
disappeared from professional social theory.
In the ?new historicism@ that emerged
under the auspices of French cultural historians, and especially of Michel
Foucault, the idea of cultural autonomy reached a culminating extreme. Foucault
and his followers deny not only that humans share a common set of psychological
structures but even that the idea of ?humanity@ is itself the
relatively recent invention of a specific cultural moment. ?Before the end
of the eighteenth century, man did not exist. . . . He is a quite recent
creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less
than two hundred years ago.@ (The Order of Things, 308). As
reference to Aristotle or almost any ancient writer will demonstrate, such
claims do not stand historical inspection, but they have nonetheless enjoyed
considerable popularity among literary theorists.
LITERARY
UNIVERSALS AND THE ADAPTED MIND
In the past two decades, evolutionary thinkers in the
human sciences have reaffirmed the elementary Darwinian idea that human beings,
like all other animals, have evolved through an adaptive process and that
consequently they display an innate, species-typical structure of cognitive and
behavioral characteristics. They have reaffirmed, that is, the primary tenet in
the theory of literary universals--the idea that there is in fact such a thing
as ?human nature.@ Literary
theorists sympathetic to Darwinian thinking must now confront two basic
questions: what precisely is this species-typical or universal structure, and
what bearing does it have on literary representation? Beyond these basic
questions, there are other problems that are familiar in the history of literary
theory and that now must be reformulated within the context of Darwinian social
science. What is the relation of literary universals to cultural
difference--differences of ethnic and national identity, socioeconomic
organization, and historical periods? And further, within any given culture,
what is the relation of literary universals to individual differences among
authors--differences of sex or gender, race, social class, temperament,
personality, and quality of mind? Theories of literature have often broached
the question of function or purpose, and most formulations have adhered to the
ancient idea that literature is both useful and pleasurable--utile et dulce.
To give just one example, in a seventeenth-century dialogue on dramatic poetry,
John Dryden=s spokesman defines a play as ?a just and
lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the
changes of fortune to which it is subject; for the delight and instruction of
mankind@ (25). The
question of function on this level must now be situated, at a deeper level, in
relation to the problem of biological or adaptive function.
Literature itself has until recently been the only great
repository of information about human nature. Empirical psychology is scarcely
a hundred years old, and much of the psychological theory in this century has
foundered amidst the sensational and distorted speculations of Freud and the
barren reductions of behaviorism. Throughout the greater part of our history,
our best psychologists have been playwrights, poets, and novelists. When Hamlet
tells the players that the purpose of the poet is to hold Athe mirror up
to nature@ (III: ii), it is human nature he has most in mind.
Literary authors have intuitively understood that the subject matter of
literature is human experience, that experience is grounded in common natural
motives and feelings, and that sympathetic response to the depiction of
experience in texts depends on the common shared experience among authors, the
characters depicted, and the audience. Understanding the inner workings of the
mind has been the heart and soul of the literary tradition, as it no doubt was
the heart and soul of the oral traditions that are the ancestors of all
literate cultures.
A Darwinian conception of the evolved and adapted
character of the human mind is the essential precondition for establishing an
empirical understanding of human nature that is profound enough and incisive
enough to correspond with the intuitive understanding embodied in the literary
tradition. If Darwin=s basic thesis about adaptive structure
is correct--the idea that all complex, functional structure is the product of
an adaptive process of natural selection--this thesis is the necessary basis
for all empirical psychology. Thus John Bowlby, an evolutionary developmental
psychologist, roundly affirms that ?not a single
feature of a species= morphology, physiology, or behaviour
can be understood or even discussed intelligently except in relation to that
species= environment of
evolutionary adaptedness@ (64).
A wide array of social scientists and a few literary
theorists now accept the basic Darwinian premise of the adapted mind--a mind
imbued with a rich and complex structure of innate dispositions and developmental
programs. Literary Darwinians make the necessary extension from this premise to
the claim that literary texts are themselves organized in close correlation
with the elementary structures of the adapted mind. Working out from this
premise, how much else is actually known? What specific features of human
nature can be identified, what organization can be discerned among them, and
how do they translate into the formal characteristics of verbal order and
literary representation?
Two main schools of thought have directed the
development of contemporary Darwinian theory about human motives: sociobiology
and evolutionary psychology. The sociobiologists formed the first wave in the
resurgence of Darwinism in the nineteen seventies. They went to the root of Darwinian
thinking, the idea of ?inclusive fitness@ as the
ultimate regulative principle of evolution. Inclusive fitness is the
differential success in the transmission of genes, and sociobiological
psychologists, geneticists, and anthropologists have tended to concentrate
their attention on the elementary biological processes of survival and
reproduction. One result of this concentration is a tendency to regard ?fitness
maximization@or the maximization of progeny as a direct and
primary motive in human behavior. Seeking to avoid this result, a younger
generation of Darwinians, the evolutionary psychologists, distinguish between
fitness maximization, as an ultimate regulative principle, and the proximal
mechanisms through which fitness is mediated. Evolutionary psychologists
maintain that these mechanisms--the structures of cognition and motivation--are
the actual evolved content of the adapted mind. Some of the most influential
evolutionary psychologists integrate Darwinian theory with cognitive
psychology, and they identify the elementary components of the adapted mind as ?cognitive
domains@or ?modules.@ These modules
are conceived as genetically transmitted mechanisms that are designed through
natural selection for the purpose of solving specific adaptive problems. They
display complex functional structure and have anatomical components,
physiological processes, or neural circuitry dedicated to the execution of
their purposes.
The theory of cognitive domains is a large-scale
research program, not an established body of confirmed fact. The identity and
number of specific domains remains an open question, and lists have been
compiled that vary from three or four to fifteen or sixteen. Much of the
controversy in such matters, like that in the study of personality factors,
consists in the problem of how to group specific items in larger categories.
Beneath such uncertainties, there is a good deal of agreement on some of the
most important large-scale components of human nature. The evolutionary
psychologist Steven Pinker summarizes a view common among cognitive
psychologists that ?innate intuitive theories or modules
for the major ways of making sense of the world@ include ?modules for
objects and forces, for animate beings, for artifacts, for minds, and for
natural kinds like animals, plants, and minerals@ (How the
Mind Works, 314-15). Pinker adds that this list, reflecting the limited
concerns of cognitive psychology, ?is surely too
short.@ A more
realistic inventory would include ?modes of
thought and feeling for danger, contamination, status, dominance, fairness,
love, friendship, sexuality, children, relatives, and the self@ (315).
Similar lists can be found in the work of Darwinian
anthropologists concerned with typical goal structures or universal human
attributes. Jerome Barkow, for instance, compiles a list of common goal
structures that includes maintaining physiological well-being, engaging in
sexual and family relations, being a member of a social group, and constructing
cognitive maps of one=s environment, including the social
environment. In a book that offers an extensive and carefully considered
treatment of human universals from within the Darwinian framework, the
anthropologist Donald Brown constructs a composite portrait of ?the universal
people,@ and in this
portrait he includes the idea of the self and of other persons as beings
actuated by beliefs and feelings, a set of six basic emotions and facial
expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust), a dimorphic
organization of sexual identity that involves division of labor and
differential reproductive strategies, the elementary forms of kinship organized
around the four components of the nuclear family (father, mother, son,
daughter), some basic forms of social interaction, such as reciprocal exchange
and status relations, the formulation of world views, and some basic forms of
proto-literary (oral) expression, including narrative, metaphor, metonomy,
onomatopoeia, and poetic meter.
Brown argues that the idea of the self or of individual
persons is a human universal, and Pinker suggests it is almost certainly one of
the evolved ?modules@ or cognitive
domains. Among human beings, the sense of individual persons is the conscious
correlative for the biological concept of the organism, and this concept is an
essential precondition for the organization of behavior in goal-directed ways
and for the interaction of individuals in social groups. In literary
structures, the idea of an individual self is indispensable to the organization
of literary meaning. Characters in poems, plays, and stories are individuals,
and authors necessarily present their stories from some distinct point of view.
All emotion and cognition is organized within the individual mind, and the
response of audiences to literary works is thus necessarily lodged in
individuals, even when the response is collectively experienced, as in the
audience of a play. For these reasons, the study of individual psychology is
both integral to the Darwinian conception of human beings and to literary
analysis. As Taine understood, within both biology and literary analysis, the
concept of an organism necessarily involves a complementary concept of an
environment. Character and setting are thus elementary and inescapable
components of all literary representation, and the principles that apply to all
biological interaction must be taken as the larger context for all depicted
action in literary texts. We now have a steadily growing body of empirical
findings about the organization of individual organisms--psychological,
cognitive, emotional--and the interactions of individuals with their social and
physical worlds, and all of this information can be used as a framework for the
critical analysis of literary depictions of human nature.
The modern study of Darwinian psychology has tended to
concentrate on the idea of human universals, and within the Darwinian community
itself there has been controversy over the adaptive significance of individual
variations. Theorists who believe that individual variations are not adaptively
important argue that adaptations display complex functional structure and that
any such structure must be common to the species as a whole. Others seek to
explain the adaptive value of variation within a given social ecology. For literary
study, the vital point to be made is that universals and individual variations
are not mutually exclusive concepts. The dimensions through which individual
identity is structured and in which it necessarily varies are themselves
universals. These dimensions are part of the evolved structure of human nature.
Two of the most important patterns through which
individual identity is structured are personality factors and emotions. The
five major factors of personality--extraversion/introversion, friendliness/hostility,
neuroticism/security, conscientiousness/carelessness, and
curiosity/dullness--can be used for the comparative analysis of characters,
authors, and audience response. The universal human emotions are essential
components in the tonal and generic structures in literary texts. Sadness is
the basis of elegy and tragedy; and happiness the basis of comedy. Surprise is
essential to suspense, and anger and disgust are the animating sentiments of
satire. All individuals experience some measure of such emotions, and all
individuals experience some of the affects that attend on the polar terms in
the factors of personality. But individuals vary a great deal in the degree to
which they experience any given emotion, for instance, anger or fear, and in
their characteristically open or self-enclosed relations with the outside
world.
The most important general structure available for the
hierarchical analysis of motivating concerns within narrative and dramatic
structures is the study of motives or life-goals. Motives vary in the depth and
intensity of the concern they evoke. Some motivations have more fundamental
structural significance than others. Brown observes that some universals ?are deeply
meaningful to humans,@ and he specifies ?the attachments
of family members, the grief they will feel at loss, the anguish at betrayal;
bonds of loyalty among members of a group; pleasure in music and dance;
distinguishing between true and false,@ and ?recognizing the
morality in reciprocity@ (?Human
Universals and Their Implications,@10). Generally, the
closer one comes to the elementary principles of inclusive fitness--the closer
to survival and reproduction (including family relations)--the deeper and more
compelling the concern. The evolutionary psychologist David Buss notes that ?power and love
emerge consistently and cross-culturally as the two most important dimensions
of interpersonal behavior@ (21). They emerge also as the two most
important motivating concerns in the plot structures of dramatic and narrative
texts. Not all texts follow precisely the same struture of species-typical
values and concerns, but the species-typical concerns provide the larger
context within which all variation takes place, and they thus provide a common
framework of analysis and comparison.
The question of the adaptive function of literature is
at present highly controverted. At one extreme, literary theorists who take fitness
maximization as a direct motive speculate that the writing of literature is a
form of personal or sexual display. From this perspective, writing is a means
of attracting attention, enhancing prestige, and thus advancing one=s reproductive
prospects. At an opposite point on the spectrum of speculation about adaptive
function, Steven Pinker suggests that the pleasurable aspect of all artistic
activity, including literature, is merely a non-functional by-product of higher
cognitive processes. Other theorists have argued that art and literature serve
an array of adaptive purposes, including emotional and personal development,
the integration of higher cognitive faculties and the elementary motivational
structures, social bonding, social subversion, and cognitive mapping or the
construction of models that can organize the complex and emotionally rich
features of subjective life. Constructing an argument in parallel with those
constructed for cognitive domains, one could note that literature or
proto-literary forms of oral-behavior are universal features of human life,
that they consume large quantities of energy and attention, and that they
display complex functional structure. On these grounds, one could reasonably
argue that they quite possibly have adaptive value. At the very least, they are
forms of understanding and communication, and they participate in the adaptive
value that attaches to all understanding and communication.
References
Abrams,
M. H. (1995), AWhat Is a Humanistic Criticism?@, in: D. Eddins (ed.), The Emperor
Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, pp. 13-44.
Alexander,
R. D. (1982), The Biology of Moral Systems, Hawthorne, N. Y.: Aldine de
Gruyter.
Aristotle
(1982), Aristotle's "Poetics", J. Hutton (trans.), New York:
W. W. Norton.
Arnhart,
L. (1998), Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature,
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Arnold,
M. (1960), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, R. H. Super
(ed.), vol. 1, On The Classical Tradition, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Barash,
D. P. (1997), AIn Search of Behavioral Individuality@, Human Nature, 8, 2, pp.
153-69.
Barkow,
J. H. (1989), Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and
Culture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Betzig,
L. (1991), "History", in M. Maxwell (ed.), The Sociobiological
Imagination, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Blake,
W. (1965), The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, D.V. Erdman and H.
Bloom (eds.), Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday.
Bowlby,
J. (1982), Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, Attachment, 2nd ed., New
York: Basic Books.
Boyd,
B. (1998), AJane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature@, Philosophy and Literature,
22, 1, pp. 1-30.
Brown,
D. E. (1991), Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Brown, D. E., (1999), ?Human
Universals and Their Implications@, unpublished typescript.
Browning, R. (1981), AAn Essay on
Percy Bysshe Shelley,@ in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, with Variant
Readings and Annotations, R.A. King, Jr., J. W. Herring, P. Honan, A. N.
Kincaid, A. C. Dooley (eds.), vol. 5, Athens: Ohio University Press.
Buss, D. (1995), AEvolutionary Psychology: A New
Paradigm for Psychological Science@, Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1,
pp. 1-30.
Carey, S. and E. Spelke (1994), ADomain-specific Knowledge and
Conceptual Change@, in L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the
Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carroll,
J. (1995), Evolution and Literary Theory, Columbia: University of
Missouri Press.
Carroll,
J. (1998), ASteven Pinker=s Cheesecake for the Mind@, Philosophy and Literature,
22, 2, pp. 478-85.
Constable,
J. AVerse Forms: A Pilot Study in the
Epidemiology of Representations@, Human Nature, 8, 2, pp. 171-203.
Cooke,
B. (1995), AMicroplots: The Case of Swan Lake.@, Human Nature, 6, 2, pp.
183-96.
Cosmides,
L. and J. Tooby (1994), AOrigins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional
Organization@, in L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Degler,
C. N. (1991), In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of
Darwinism in American Social Thought, New York: Oxford University Press.
Digman,
J. M. (1990), "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor
Model", Annual Review of Psychology, 41, pp. 417-40.
Dissanayake,
E. (1992), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why, New York:
Free Press.
Dissanayake,
E. (forthcoming), Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Dryden,
J. (1970), Selected Criticism, J. Kinsley and G. Parfitt (eds.), Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Easterlin,
N. (1993), "Play, Mutation, and Reality Acceptance: Toward a Theory of
Literary Experience", in Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling (eds.), After
Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Ekman,
P. and R. J. Davidson (eds.) (1994), The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental
Questions, New York: Oxford University Press.
Eliot,
G. (1977), Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews, and
Criticism, B. G. Hornback (ed.), New York: W. W. Norton.
Eysenck,
H. J. (1980), "The Biosocial Nature of Man", Journal of Social and
Biological Structures, 3, pp. 125-34.
Foucault,
M. (1973), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
New York: Vintage.
Fox,
R. (1989), The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and
Morality, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Fox,
R. (1995), ASexual Conflict in the Epics@, Human Nature, 6, 2, pp.
135-44.
Frank,
R. (1988), Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions,
New York: W. W. Norton.
Freeman,
D. (1999), The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of
Her Samoan Research, Boulder, Co.: Westview.
Frye,
N. (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton
University Press..
Hawkins,
M. (1997), Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson,
S. (1990), The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16, Rasselas
and Other Tales, G. J. Kolb (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jung, C. (1966), AOn the Relation
of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,@ in The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Sir H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W.
McGuire (eds.), vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, R. F.
C. Hull (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Koch, W. A. (1993), The Roots of Literature,
Bochum, Germany: Universitätsverlag Dr. Robert Brockmeyer.
Lewis, M. and J. M. Haviland (eds.) (1993), Handbook
of Emotions, New York: Guilford.
MacDonald, K. (1990), AA Perspective
on Darwinian Psychology: The Importance of Domain-General Mechanisms,
Plasticity, and Individual Differences@, Ethology
and Sociobiology, 12, 6, pp. 449-80.
McCrae, R. R. (ed.) (1992), Journal of Personality
(special issue: The Five-Factor Model: Issues and Applications), 60, 2,
pp. 175-532.
Miller, G. (1998), ALooking to Be
Entertained: Three Strange Things that Evolution Did to Our Minds@, Times
Literary Supplement, no. 4985 (October 16), pp.14-15.
Mithen, S. (1996), The Prehistory of the Mind: The
Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, London: Thames and Hudson.
Murdock, G. P. (1968), "The Common Denominator of
Cultures", in S. L. Washburn and Phyllis C. Jay (eds.), Perspectives on
Human Evolution 1, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Nesse, M. (1995), AGuinivere=s Choice@, Human
Nature, 6, 2, pp.145-63.
Pater, W. (1980), The Renaissance: Studies in Art and
Poetry , D. L. Hill (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pater, W. (1910), Greek Studies, London:
Macmillan.
Pervin, L.A. (ed.) (1990), Handbook of Personality:
Theory and Research, New York: Guilford.
Pinker, S. (1994), The Language Instinct, New
York: William Morrow.
Pinker, S. (1997), How the Mind Works, New York:
Norton.
Plato (1937), The Dialogues of Plato, B. Jowett
(trans.), 2 vols., New York: Random House.
Schiller, F. (1965), On the Aesthetic Education of
Man in a Series of Letters, Reginald Snell (trans.), New York: Frederick
Ungar.
Schiller, F. (1966), Naive and Sentimental Poetry
and On The Sublime: Two Essays, Julius A. Elias (trans.), New York:
Frederick Ungar.
Shelley, P. B. (1909, rpt. 1969), Shelley's Literary
and Philosophical Criticism, John Shawcroft (ed.), Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft.
Sperber, D. (1994), AThe Modularity
of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations@, in L. A.
Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in
Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Storey, R. (1996), Mimesis and the Human Animal: On
the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Sugiyama, M. S. (1996), AOn the Origins
of Narrative: Storyteller Bias as a Fitness Enhancing Strategy@, Human
Nature, 7, 4, pp. 403-25.
Symons, D. (1992), AOn the Use and
Misuse of Darwinism in the Study of Human Behavior", in J. H. Barkow, L.
Cosmides, and J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and
the Generation of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press.
Taine, H. (1879), History of English Literature,
Henry van Laun (trans.), 2 vols. in 1, New York: Henry Holt.
Thiessen, D. and Y. Umezawa (1998), AThe
Sociobiology of Everyday Life: A New Look at a Very Old Novel@, Human
Nature, 9, 3, pp. 293-320.
Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides (1990), AOn the Universality
of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and
Adaptation@, Journal of Personality, 58, 1, pp. 17-67.
Tooby, J. And L. Cosmides (1992), "The
Psychological Foundations of Culture", in J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and
J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
Generation of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press.
Trivers, R. (1985), Social Evolution, Menlo Park:
Benjamin/Cummings.
Watt, I. (1957), The Rise of the Novel: Studies in
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whissell, C. (1996), AMate Selection
in Popular Women=s Fiction@, Human
Nature, 7, 4, pp. 427-47.
Wilson, J. Q. (1993), The Moral Sense, New York:
The Free Press.
Wilson, E. (1931), Axel=s Castle: A
Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, New York: W.
W. Norton.
Wordsworth, W. (1965), Selected Poems and Prefaces,
Jack Stillinger (ed.), Boston: Houghton Mifflin.