The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind

Given The Current Climate of Higher Education, the question of the usefulness of literature is pressing. As the United States moves inexorably toward a practical notion of the university’s mission, all of the humanities, and perhaps most particularly arts-centered disciplines in state-funded systems, have to fight for their survival. Without doubt, this is, at present, a losing battle. However, the urgency of this matter may obscure the fact that conceptions of literature’s use have varied considerably, not only over several thousand years of aesthetic theory, but within the much shorter span—about a hundred and fifty years—of the institutionalization of literary studies. According to Gerald Graff, “The typical American college [in the early nineteenth-century] was a quasimonastic institution where ‘the preparation of individuals for Christian leadership and the ministry’…was considered a more important goal than the advancement of knowledge.”¹ If university education in the first half of the nineteenth century functioned primarily to cultivate a male social elite, and if language and literary study thus came to serve a central role in reproducing a patriarchal, classist hierarchy, those values have, most assuredly, lost luster over time.

Understandably, literary scholars are dismayed by the narrow instrumentalism now organizing the agenda of higher education. At the same time, glancing back over the formation of English studies, one observes that values often utterly divorced from intellectual objectives have driven the formation of the field. As values shifted considerably in the twentieth century, they formed a catalyst—or are perceived to form a catalyst—for the main theoretical movements influencing American literary scholarship. Although New Critical methodology was quasiscientific, introducing a focus on the literary object through the method of close reading, its theoretical expressions encouraged severing the text from life and history, in the process reifying nineteenth-century spiritual values through insistence on the irreducibility of the organically unified work. In reaction to New Criticism’s isolationism, approaches in the seventies were influenced by sociopolitical movements, including Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and, slightly later, ecology. Concurrently, those approaches inspired by structuralism and poststructuralism particularly stressed the power of language and discourse. Yet in spite of this renewed connection between literature and the social sphere and the emphasis on its linguistic medium, in recent decades literary studies has continued to drift toward the margin of the academy.

The dominance of values as a motivating factor for theoretical and critical developments also harks back to institutional origins, because it derives from nineteenth-century ambivalence about the place of science in the humanities. This ambivalence, and its fundamental expression in the culture wars, has not been kind to literary studies.² Cast as the competitor to poetry by the Romantic era, science focuses on different objects from literary studies, and thus might likely require different methods and goals, but this is no reason to assume that verified scientific findings have no epistemic legitimacy in the humanities. In fact, some of these findings have direct bearing on the question of literature’s use or function.

Because literature and the other arts are highly complex cultural products, their potential for various legitimate uses is great. For present purposes, I will narrow my discussion down initially to a consideration of the evolved function of art, because attention to the origins of a phenomenon typically illuminates the question of its use. Furthermore, because evolutionary social science is specifically concerned with the function of traits, it compels us to ask: why do we have literature at all? The theory of evolution by natural selection is corroborated by fossil findings and the study of living organisms. Not all evolutionary hypotheses can be proven, or proven easily, such as those that apply to mind, complex behaviors, and cultural artifacts, for which there cannot be hard evidence. But the framing hypothesis for these more speculative investigations is quite robust. Concerned with survival, evolutionary theory focuses on the functional value of species traits, since organisms that have the physical, psychical, and behavioral traits “designed” to help them operate efficiently in their environments will endure. Traits that require significant investments of time and...