Consilient literary interpretation

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 312-333

  Nordlund, Marcus ^a  

^a UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950633533     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0014     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. A sample of previous evolutionary approaches to literary theory includes Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), hereafter abbreviated ELT
2. Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996)
3. and Nancy Easterlin, "Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and the Foundations of Literary Theory," Mosaic 32.1 (1999): 131-47; hereafter abbreviated MK
4. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998)
5. Richard Levin, "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism," in After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, ed. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 13-44
6. Roger Trigg, Reality at Risk: A Defence of Realism in Philosophy and the Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. xxi
7. Tony Jackson, "Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Criticism," Poetics Today 21 (2000): 319-47
8. Here I draw on Nancy Easterlin's definition of a "biocultural" approach that aims to "synthesize cultural explanation with bioevolutionary explanation" in "Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism," Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2 (2001): 59-73; 65. Some critics prefer the term biopoetics to denote "the relatively unexplored intersections of evolutionary processes and material culture" (panel rubric, HBES conference 1999). I prefer the former term, which includes both poetics and thematics
9. Patrick Colm Hogan, "Literary Universals," Poetics Today 18 (1997): 223-49
10. Alan Richardson, "Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind," New Literary History 31.3 (2000): 553-72; 569, 561, 569-70
11. Alexander J. Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991)
12. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)
13. Whereas Mark Turner claims that the view of meaning as something attributed by human brains invalidates the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, I would maintain that it makes these categories inescapably intersubjective. ("Design for a Theory of Meaning," in The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning [Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum Associates, 1994], pp. 91-107.)
14. For useful hermeneutical critiques of such relativist and postmodernist self-referential paradoxes, see Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)
15. and Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994)
16. Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 288-306, p. 306
17. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 40
18. Brian Boyd, "Jane, Meet Charles: Literature, Evolution, and Human Nature," PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE 22.1 (1998): 1-30, 15
19. On the problems that face historical contextualism, see chapter six in David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
20. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. 1993. (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 302
21. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 1995, reprint (London: Penguin, 1996)
22. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, 1979, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 187
23. This complaint has been voiced, for example, in Marcus Nordlund, "On the Phenomenological Reduction," Proceedings from the Sixth Nordic Conference for English Studies, ed. Gerd Bjorhovde and Goril Rogne (Tromso: Department of English, 1995)
24. and Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)
25. Leslie Stevenson and David L. Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 38
26. For example, a classic case for the universality (or at least near-universality) of romantic love across human societies can be found in W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer, "A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love," reprinted in Human Emotions: A Reader, ed. Jennifer M. Jenkins, Keith Oatley, and Nancy L. Stein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 55-62