A brief overview of literary Darwinism and a Darwinian perspective on The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The first section of this paper presents in general terms the main ideas of literary Darwinism represented by Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall and other scholars concerning theory (literature as an adaptation) and interpretative practice. It also reviews the key arguments of this literary school’s critics focusing on the papers of Jonathan Kramnick and William Deresiewicz. The second section is an attempt at applying Darwinian methodology to the interpretation of The Road by Cormac McCarthy taking into account its reception, style, the behavioural systems (survival, parenting, and cognitive activity), the literary context and the author’s point of view.

Angus Fletcher’s Other Literary Darwinism

Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.

Ian McEwan

Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic self-interest and society is structured around competition, while our tendency to self-deception disguises our motives from ourselves and others. This bleak view of human nature, which was promoted in the 1990s by influential figures such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, informs the characterization and plot of McEwan’s major novels (Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday). It also inflects the movement known as literary Darwinism, with which McEwan was closely associated. Having charted McEwan’s tight connections with neo-Darwinism, the chapter concludes with a reading of his recent novel Nutshell (2016) as a witty subversion of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxies which shaped his earlier work

Foundational Functions of Fiction

Part II is pivotal and substantial, demonstrating the uses of humanist inquiry at the level of narrative theory. It reveals how the concerns of narrative humanism can be situated alongside concepts developed in contemporary media theory, cognitive film studies, literary Darwinism, anthropology, social psychology and philosophy. This chapter introduces the concept of social narratology: a catalogue of the various social functions that story provides throughout our lives, and the way a humanist might use this knowledge to both understand and to create stories of ethical substance.

A Structural Approach to the Monomyth in Contemporary Action Cinema: Dredd, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road

The aim of the thesis is to provide an overview of three contemporary action films: Dredd 3D, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road, through a so-called "bio-structuralist" approach - combining archetypal criticism, literary Darwinism, and narratology, into a unified, holistic theoretical model.The thesis is divided into four main parts: (1) an introduction, that gives a rationale for the aim, scope, and the design of the thesis, (2) a theoretical framework, which provides both an overview of the theories and fits them in the general model, (3) a part including the case studies, that puts the theoretical approach to the test, and finally (4) a conclusion that gives a verdict on the feasibility of the model and summarizes the findings.A particular emphasis is put on the monomyth as a story paradigm that all the films in the case studies share, whose combination of a biologically dictated scaffolding, and cultural brickwork is an excellent testing ground for the theoretical model.In addition to the attempts of revealing glimpses of our evolved nature in the plots, narrative conventions, cinematography, themes, motivations, settings, and character networks in the films, the thesis attempts to balance the hardliner literary Darwinist stance of the dominance of biology over culture, with an acknowledgment of the existence of cultural transmission and stylistic evolution. Thus, the thesis proposes terminology that differentiates between cultural units totally dominated by biology, partially tied to it, and completely independent of it, albeit spread in ways reminiscent of biological evolution.The proposed theoretical model is shown to be a viable alternative to post-structuralist approaches as far as the study of action cinema is concerned, with its ample scope serving as its principal advantage.

Why Beauty Matters

For those of us for whom “literary Darwinism,” which bases its “scientific” approach to literary criticism on evolutionary psychology, has seemed an intellectual disaster, but who continue to believe that it is important to incorporate science cooperatively into our study of literature; for those who are concerned about how art and literature matter in a world so troubled and dangerous; for those convinced Darwinians who find themselves skeptical about and uneasy with the mechanico-materialist version of Darwinism that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have made popular; for those who find that the science they credit is yet inadequately attentive to women's perspectives, Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty offers a potentially marvelous option. A distinguished ornithologist, Prum has undertaken an enormously ambitious project, whose implications run from evolutionary biology to aesthetics. From the perspective of a very unscientific literary guy and a wannabe birder, I slightly distrust my enthusiasm for the book. But Prum's arguments are creatively provocative and brilliantly argued, even when they get rather iffily hypothetical; his ornithological studies are intrinsically fascinating, even to nonbirders, and at the same time they have potentially transformative implications. What he has to say, even if his inferences can and should be challenged, deserves the most serious engagement.

Peirce, evolutionary aesthetics, and literary meaning: Tension, index, symbol

This paper will use several notions of Charles Peirce – his Categories and semiotics – and interweave evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and literary studies in order to connect the disciplines such that the natural sciences may be used as interpretive tools in literary exegesis. Despite the ostensible differences between literary texts and the endeavors of the natural sciences, Peirce’s ideas can put them into conversation. Current evolutionary literary theories like Literary Darwinism require a more solid footing and methodology from which to ground their hypotheses, and this paper will use a philosophical frame to connect the pieces. Peirce and those following his ideas provide the inroads for such a mixed methodology, which will undergird current evolutionary aesthetic practice without needlessly replacing other literary theories. This article will outline Peirce’s schema and a modern reconfiguration thereof, and then will posit that literature (here focusing on a short story) functions as a tension between the iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes of representation. Peirce’s Categories permit reality into the language/text/literature debate, and his notion of the Index can be used as reference to evolved traits in homo sapiens in literary representation. Peirce gives organization, coherence, and cohesion without limiting the interpretational possibility of a literary work.

Evolutionary Aesthetics

The fourth chapter on “Evolutionary Aesthetics” provides a comprehensive and detailed account of both strengths and weaknesses among recent aesthetic and cultural theories (such as homo aestheticus, literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, etc) based upon neo-Darwinian theory.