Where Readers Meet The Road: On a Class Project Integrating Personality with the Evolutionary Study of Literature

This article reports on a class project designed to help undergraduates learn about individual differences and personality in the evolutionary study of literature. Drawing on an anonymous packet that included a classmate’s answers to personality, reading style, reading preference, and demographic questionnaires, students analyzed a classmate’s liking of and responses to reading Cormac McCarthy’s popular novel The Road. The project helped students go beyond interpretative approaches to the novel by examining the pressure points where individual differences affect a reader’s fictional experience. It also appears to have successfully taught students to assess how well a concrete individual case stands up to scientific theories and tools designed to measure broad-based generalities. In doing so, students learned about theoretical and methodological differences between the sciences and the humanities as well as the real-world complexity of a reader’s responses to a novel.