A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation by Nancy Easterlin (review)

It’s rare that a scholarly work manages to be both sensible and daring, but in A Biocultural Approach, Nancy Easterlin accomplishes the trick. Her goal is to describe a new method for applying the biological sciences to contemporary literary theory, and the result is an exciting and wide-ranging book filled with thoughtful observations about the current state of literary practice and bursting with imaginative enrichments for its future.

Easterlin begins by distinguishing her own approach from the method of “consilience” proposed by the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and promoted by Literary Darwinists such as Joseph Carroll. In a respectful but direct critique of consilience, Easterlin argues that its efforts to construct a “Grand Theory” have neglected the most crucial feature of literature: its rich interpretability (20). Literary objects, after all, do not admit of just one reading. They invite multiplicities, and so to analyze these objects like chemical compounds, subjecting them to “reduction and synthesis,” is to destroy their special place in human life (20). This, Easterlin suggests, is the real reason that consilience has yet to find much purchase in the humanities. Not because literary scholars are close-minded about science, but because they are disturbed by its failure to capture their ordinary experience of literature. The great irony of consilience, in effect, is that for all its rhetoric of empiricism, it has replicated the missteps of “deductive” methods of textual analysis (34). Rather than beginning, like Darwin, by acknowledging the wonderful diversity and vital particularity of life, it has followed Herbert Spencer, using a general theory to impose a curiously medieval schematic.

To restore an empirical appreciation of the particularity of literature, Easterlin therefore grounds her own “biocultural” method in an embrace of the open-ended diversity of interpretation, accepting (indeed encouraging) a branching of meaning. While she gives her book its own distinct coherence by focusing on biological theories about the origins and functions of human life, she thus does not use science to produce an authoritative account of literature. Quite the reverse. When biological theories threaten literary complexity, Easterlin takes the opportunity to critique them, so that instead of serving as an object of scientific reduction, literature helps science become more nuanced.

As Easterlin notes, this tolerant, organic, and pluralist method of empiricism owes something to the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, and in keeping with the broad outlines of a pragmatic method, she proceeds by adopting a problem-based approach. Rather than proposing a master blueprint of biocultural criticism, her book models different possibilities through a series of case studies, each motivated not by an overarching critical agenda but by a moment where existing literary theory breaks down. Her first case study grows out of the aesthetic blind spot in “ideological” (e.g., Marxist) approaches to literature; her second, out of the neglect of human perspectives in Ecocriticism; her third, out of the disregard for spatial thinking by cognitive critics; and her fourth, out of the difficulties posed for Literary Darwinism by feminist evolutionary biology. Having identified these gaps in existing literary theories, Easterlin then turns to recent biological research to address them, suggesting, for example, that new studies on the cognitive function of narrative can help Marxists appreciate the story-busting aesthetic of Romantic poetry without sacrificing a stance of active critique, or that an attention to ecological psychology can help Ecocritics explore why they (as human observers) have come to “love” nature themselves (151). And finally, Easterlin puts these revised theories to the test by applying them to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works such as Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. True to her rejection of deduction, in other words, Easterlin adopts what pragmatists identify as the scientific method: a dynamic give-and-take between theorizing and data-gathering that presses our existing theoretical frameworks to expand in response to fresh physical evidence. The result is thus not a synthetic worldview but a community of [End Page 290...