Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 3(2005)1, 2338

HOW TO WRITE THE GREAT DARWINIAN NOVEL: COGNITIVE PREDISPOSITIONS, CULTURAL COMPLEXITY, AND AESTHETIC EVALUATION
NANCY EASTERLIN
English Department, University of New Orleans

Abstract. This essay argues that the new field of Darwinian (or biocultural) literary criticism must attend to sociocultural change as well as evolved predispositions in the assessment of literary merit (aesthetic value). Because contemporaneous sociocultural factors constitute a major part of the environment of literary production, they have significant bearing on the perceived aesthetic value of any given work of literature. In particular, the development of a complex literary culture since the industrial revolution enables manipulations of literary forms not possible in oral culture. Focusing specifically on the example of postmodern antinarrative and the Peter CAREY (1997) novel Jack Maggs, a retelling of Charles DICKENS (1860/1999) Great Expectations, the author suggests that subversion of linear story may have culturally contingent epistemic, and therefore perhaps aesthetic, value. Keywords: Darwinian literary criticism, cognitive literary criticism, literary aesthetics, narrativity, postmodern antinarrative

Current Darwinian (or biocultural) literary criticism emerged in the early 1990s, largely in response to the postmodernist beliefs that have dramatically influenced literary criticism since the late sixties. One feature of much literary theoretical postmodernism is its pronounced embrace of social and cultural constructionism, that is, of the view that human psychology, behavior, and artifacts are best explained by social analysis apart from any consideration of the possible features of an evolved human nature. Certainly, many theorists and scholars who adopt a constructionist perspective are not so radical as to claim that human nature is a null set, but they have avoided all discussion of the subject and of its relevance to literature. In opposition to this, Darwinian critics argue that certain thematic preoccupations and structural features of literature attest to a universal evolved psychology. Darwinians suggest, for instance, that the preponderance of story lines dealing with courtship and marriage or with status and competition, or the propensity to construe events in linear sequence or in binary pairs, attests to universal cognitive predispositions. A number of prominent Darwinian critics have made it their task to elucidate the themes and story structures resulting from human universals (CARROLL 1995, 1999, 2001; COOKE 1998; GOTTSCHALL 2001).
15895254 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest