Evolution and Literary Theory

by Joseph Carroll

Carroll anatomizes the irrationalism of current literary theory with surgical precision. In a concise, lucid prose, he lays bare the sophistries at the heart of the doctrines propounded by Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, J. Hillis Miller, Fish, and many others. In opposition to the textualism and indeterminacy that constitute the central doctrines of poststructuralism, Carroll affiliates himself with a realist and naturalist tradition of thought that runs from Darwin and Huxley, through Leslie Stephen and Thorstein Veblen, to Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper. He offers a comprehensive synthesis of current evolutionary theory in the human sciences, and he shows why the evolutionary paradigm provides the only adequate source for a modern theory of culture.

536 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1994

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Joseph Carroll (b. 1949) is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, where he has taught since 1985.
Evolution and Literary Theory established the field of evolutionary literary studies and critiqued poststructuralist theory for seeing the world as if it were textual and for seeing meaning as undecidable. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature collected the essays from Carroll’s next decade. A second volume, Reading Human Nature, collected later essays. Carroll and colleagues have applied empirical methods—an Internet survey of reader responses—to an evolutionary analysis of British nineteenth century fiction, Graphing Jane Austen. Carroll edited Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

"If a theory of culture and literature is true, it can be assimilated to the Darwinian paradigm; and if it cannot be reconciled with that paradigm, it is not true."

All professors in the humanities need to read that sentence. Carroll's more recent work ("Evolution and Literary Theory" was written in 1994) is more interesting and less polemical, and much of what he argues against is more or less stricken from the academy, anyway, making long chapters focused on condemning Foucaultian and Poststructuralist theory a little superfluous. Still, Carroll's proposal for a more biologically-based foundation for serious literary criticism offers one escape from the deep hole wherein lies broken-legged literary study.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literary criticism is EXTREMELY hard to get through when you don't spend all day buried in literature, but it makes you feel like a much better person for the effort in the end.
Plus, I now have plenty of books it referred me to whenever I get to the Library next! I plan to return next week at some point.