ducksanddrakes

At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Britt Peterson revives Jonathan Gottschall’s Boston Globe essay “Measure for Measure,” which created a minor brouhaha a couple of months back. Gottschall’s essay argues that literary scholars ought to try out techniques that are informed by – and accountable to – the sciences. Peterson draws on this to highlight a group of “Literary Darwinists” whose scholarship is supposedly transforming literary studies nowadays. Peterson describes an approach that

Emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

I have considered Gottschall’s essay at length in the past (“Substance,” Part I, Part II and Part III). Here I’d like to highlight Peterson’s approach to reporting Darwinist literary studies. My worry is that the Darwinist intervention is overestimated due to errors in the article’s depiction of how such interventions are recognized. That is, while several passages accurately detail developments in literary criticism, Peterson does not explain to the reader how these changes typically come about in the field. Oddly, this is a paper about how approaches inspired by Darwinian evolution are evolving literary criticism, but it does not tell us much about how the latter sort of evolution takes place and develops over time.

Don’t get me wrong: Peterson has clearly done serious reporting, offering germane quotes from the likes of William Deresiewicz, Lisa Zunshine, Franco Moretti and even Gottschall himself. Yet little attention is paid to the overall world of literary criticism, a big, lumbering intellectual field of written knowledge. As a result, a whole set of trenchant questions has been unduly neglected. By showing Peterson’s misconceptions, which are doubtless partly the fault of scholarship itself, perhaps some light can be shed on how scholars can more effectively relate internal disciplinary developments to external queries, a practice at which we have been consistently derelict.

Let me point out a couple of passages that illustrate Peterson’s difficulty. Here, Lisa Zunshine objects to Peterson’s idea that Literary Darwinism is in vogue nowadays:

Many literary scholars are skeptical of the idea that Literary Darwinism will save their sector of the academy. And some of the strongest criticism comes from those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method. Literary Darwinists are “a very small group of people that position themselves as martyrs for the cause … because they expect to be berated by everyone else in the field,” says Lisa Zunshine, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, who works with cognitive approaches to understanding literature. “But, in spite of the publicity that they’re getting, I don’t see that they’re actually attracting so many people.”

Literary Darwinists beg to differ. Gottschall’s Globe article is a bracing manifesto, outlining the sad state of the literary academy and pointing to scientific method as the only life raft in sight. “Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof,” he writes. “The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away.” He provides two demonstrations of his approach. The first is a study just published in the journal Human Nature, in which he collects accounts of beauty in fairy tales from around the world to test whether Western tales place an extraordinary importance on female beauty. The second is a comparison of reactions from “500 literary scholars and avid readers” to characters from 19th-century British novels to gauge whether the author is truly dead …

Zunshine argues that Literary Darwinism isn’t so hot. The Darwinists counter with a bewildering choice of evidence: Gottschall’s a good writer; we published a study in Human Nature. These are preposterous as refutations because these facts do not present to us the “so many people” that Zunshine says are missing. As it stands, the only writers that Peterson can cite in this article are Gottschall, Brian Boyd and Joseph Carroll, and the totality of the Darwinist literature appears to be but one volume of essays, a forthcoming paper in Style, a forthcoming book by Gottschall, and a few tomes by Stephen Pinker and E. O. Wilson, who aren’t literary critics. With not much of a posse at his back, Gottschall somewhat wishfully expresses confidence that “ambitious young scholars” will see some “glamor” in Literary Darwinism.

If I were him, I’d hope that they saw some substance.

Anyway, I am troubled by this wishful thinking more due to Peterson’s ill-advised willingness to accept it as evidence of importance. When theories “attract people” in literary studies, they are usually published in PMLA or Critical Inquiry, not The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe or even Human Nature. Moreover, if Literary Darwinism was really a big deal, there would have been special panels at the MLA, graduate seminar syllabi and dissertation abstracts all across the country, not to mention dozens of forthcoming titles from the University presses. All of these things are true of literary studies that borrow from cognitive theory, but none are true of Literary Darwinism – at least not according to what the article tells us about this supposedly compelling subject.

To point this out is no more elitist than saying that new science is taken most seriously when it is published in Nature, or that the gameplay of this year’s hockey will be set by the NHL. Granted, theories that do not appear in venerated venues are sometimes the vanguard of new schools of thought that challenge the sclerotic status quo. But this is rare – novelty always is, that’s what makes it valuable. More often, theories that do not appear in these forums are weak ones that are probably shying away from the eyes of those who are best able to assess their worthiness and the venues in which such scrutiny occurs.

Zunshine knows this. Gottschall knows it, too. Why doesn’t Peterson? More precisely: why doesn’t she feel that as part of reporting this story it is necessary to look into the larger architecture of literary studies in order to assess the depth and breadth of the impact of Literary Darwinism?

The answer is revealed by another problematic passage, in which Peterson again lines up an objection for Gottschall to knock down:

Natalia Cecire, a literary blogger and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote an impassioned denunciation [of 'Measure for Measure']: “For a literary critic, Gottschall seems alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do.” Taking issue with his finding that Western society is not alone in its sexism, she charged, “I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of ‘scholars’ (plural) who have said that. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics.”

The Literary Darwinists expect and almost court that type of dismissal. The scholars tend to see themselves as outsiders: denied jobs at prestigious universities, tenured positions, and grant money because of the iconoclastic nature of their work. Gottschall is still an adjunct, and he says he believes that no one of a “principally Darwinian bent” has tenure, except for those who originally started down a more-traditional path. “It is true that we are promoting views that seem disturbingly alien or threatening to most of the professors who serve on hiring committees, editorial boards, and who comprise the main pool of peer reviewers,” he says. Carroll says that he is “looking forward” to the day when he can just “get down and do the work,” instead of being forced to constantly explain and defend his approach.

Cecire has pithily raised an intelligent point of information, one that hacks at a main struts supporting Gottschall’s essay and casts doubt on whether or not he knows of what he speaks. Moreover, Cecire’s question is ironically about facts, precisely the obdurate materials that Gottschall argues we must get back to. If Gottschall is really knowledgable about the state of litcrit, and if he is really dedicated to the hard and fast reality of experimental science – he might be both – then he ought to have an answer to this challenge. Peterson should be pressing for one, too, or at least reporting about his relative willingness to answer. But she doesn’t. Instead, she turns this into a corny drama, making the Darwinists into a renegade motorcycle club rebelling against a bunch of squares, albeit a bunch of post-structuralist Marxist squares.

This leads me to what I think is the source of Peterson’s trouble: she thinks that the story is about people, their opinions and conflicts with one another. That’s why it’s important to talk to writers and report on the prejudices of hiring committees, but not so important to report flaws in Gottschall’s case. By the same token, it falls outside the ambit of this article to check if the Library of Congress has a subject heading for “Literary Darwinism,” or to tell us whether or not there has been a major conference on the subject this year. These are exactly the places where a literary scholar would begin, because for a literary critic this problem is emphatically not about people or opinions, but about a body of knowledge that is independent of both.

Notice how important knowledge is to the scholars interviewed in the piece.

William Deresiewicz:

I worry that they proceed from a failure or an unwillingness to recognize or see that science and literature represent different areas of knowledge.

Franco Moretti:

If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it eludes form, or just doesn’t ‘see’ it, then it will mean exactly nothing.

Joseph Tabbi:

If you’re interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and questions that fall into the category of narratology. I’m not sure that by taking samples and doing statistical processing that you’re going to get very far.

To Peterson these statements evince “resistance” to the new. But the scholars are just saying that if they are going to be successful, theories need to offer results that could not be got otherwise. Does the study of mating really tell us something about Austen that we didn’t know before? That’s what matters, not bikers or squares.

At bottom, the problem is a discrepancy between the perceptual world of the reporter and that of scholars. It’s what makes academic stories different – they are not just about people, but also about knowledge that is not only embodied in human sources to be interviewed and arranged into opposing camps, but also in essays, professional societies, conference papers and all sorts of the other bric-a-brac that are not equal, and have to be attended to with an experienced eye, because they define which approaches create useful knowledge. Neglecting this, Peterson has made a contextual error that mistakenly aggrandizes Gottschall’s challenge.

But it’s not just her error. It is also an error on the part of scholars for not satisfactorily providing a more accurate account of what the Darwinists would have to achieve in order to develop into a truly influential movement. We need to give some collective thought to developing a manner to easily relate interior disciplinarity to exterior readers in a vivid way.

Now that, I’m bold enough to say, would be both substantial and glamorous.