#172 Joseph Carroll: Literary Darwinism, Postmodernism, And The Humanities

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Dr. Joseph Carroll 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. Dr. Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory was one of the first literary studies to "take the cue from important developments in disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and sociobiology," seeing evolutionary biology as an alternative to poststructuralism and rejecting poststructuralism's textualism (the notion that world is made of words) and indeterminancy (the self-subverting character of "discourse"). He’s also the author of Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature, Reading Human Nature, Graphing Jane Austen, has also produced an edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review, and co-edited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader.

In this episode, we discuss Literary Darwinism. We talk about important insights that came from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology and how that helped get past approaches like poststructuralism and deconstructionism. We also talk about the interplay between culture and biology, and some of the most relevant aspects of human psychology in literature, as well as how to properly talk about social and cultural constructs with biology at their basis. We go through some of the most distinct approaches and hypotheses put forth by evolutionary theorists as to the biological bases of the arts and literature and how they work, from Pinker’s mental cheesecake, to E. O. Wilson’s imaginative virtual worlds, to Geoffrey Miller and sexual selection, and to Gad Saad’s consumer behavior and cognitive modules at the basis of fiction. We also refer to human universals and Jungian archetypes. Finally, we talk about how to approach the study of meaning in literature, and in what ways Darwinism and evolutionary theory can contribute to the modernization of the Humanities.

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