Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (review)

Over the last ten years, Edward O. Wilson's project of achieving a "consilience" between the sciences and the arts—or rather the study of the arts—has been gathering momentum. Evolutionary literary studies in particular has been striving vigorously to establish itself as a discipline through symposia and collections of essays, studies of individual authors, and full-length expositions of the theory of "literary Darwinism" (in Joseph Carroll's formulation) or "biopoetics" (in Brett Cooke's). Jonathan Gottschall has been at the forefront of this campaign, coediting the collection The Literary Animal, contributing a monograph on Homer, and, in Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, putting forward his own case for and approach to scientific literary scholarship.

Gottschall begins his book by painting a picture of a discipline in crisis. "People agree that the academic field of literary studies is in trouble" (1). There is "a sickening sense that the whole enterprise [of the humanities] is in slow, sure, and perhaps inexorable decline" (xi). These prophecies of collapse serve a clear rhetorical purpose. Gottschall's claim that the humanities are in crisis is necessary to justify what he himself calls his "call for upheaval; for new theory, method, and ethos; for paradigm shift" (xii). The study of literature is desperately in need of correction, and the "scientific turn," he insists, is "the only correction with the potential to lift the field from its morass" (3). This rhetoric is at once alarmist and self-aggrandizing. It is misleading too, not only about the state of the discipline—although Gottschall is clearly entitled to his opinions—but also about Gottschall's own position. Running alongside the revolutionary rhetoric is a strand of moderate reformist argument that makes a much more persuasive and sustainable case for the introduction of scientific methods into literary scholarship.

Gottschall's book is divided into two parts. The first section, "On Theory, Method, and Attitude," falls into three chapters. In the first chapter Gottschall seeks to address two key anxieties over the acceptance of biopoetics as a critical approach: doubts over the scientific legitimacy of evolutionary psychology and distaste for the supposed political ramifications of Darwinism. He then goes on to make a more positive case for consilience. In the second chapter he proposes his own quantitative, that is, statistical, method of literary analysis. In the third chapter he argues that we need to "rehabilitate and revamp the concept of disinterestedness" if we are to limit "the space of possible explanation" (71) for literary phenomena and so reach a better approximation to an objective understanding of our own subject. A good working knowledge of current science and of statistical method, Gottschall suggests, are important checks in helping to guarantee that disinterestedness.

Many of Gottschall's individual arguments are sound. His understanding of evolutionary psychology is sophisticated and balanced. He accepts that it "has not yet reached a stable, mature form" (26) as a science and that it cannot ignore "the importance of physical and sociocultural environments" (33). He understands too that "when biologists look at a given species or variety, they see not essences but continuously variable populations" (124). Consequently we need to distinguish human universals that characterize all people from cultural universals that appear in all cultures and absolute universals from merely statistical universals (a paradoxical piece of terminology used to describe recurrent trends and patterns rather than fixed rules) (161). Gottschall may not realize the extent to which the rhetoric of evolutionary psychology tends to reinforce essentialism even when the fine print rejects it. His own language is a case in point, as when he remarks that "humans act and think as they do" because "these patterns of thought and action … enhanced survival and reproduction in the band and tribal communities of our ancestors" (23). Rhetoric aside, in his use of evolutionary psychology in his critical practice Gottschall correctly interprets it as a statistical rather than an absolute science.

Looking again at the fine print, the...