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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

Conclusion

Evolution has become an important focus for approaches to literature
a empting to move beyond dichotomies between nature and culture,
biology and social practices. Scholars such as Joseph Carroll or
Jonathan Go schall have argued that literary texts, including literary
narratives, are shaped by evolutionary biases and predispositions. 36
For instance, in a study of the British novel Carroll et al. hypothesize
that “protagonists and their associates would form communities of co-
operative endeavor and that antagonists would exemplify dominance
37
behavior.” The problem with this approach is that the generality of
the hypothesis inevitably evacuates or at least sidelines the specific
complexity of individual texts. Largely in response to these reduction-
ist models, Nancy Easterlin has developed a “biocultural” account of
interpretation that steers clear of the universalist assumptions of hard-
nosed evolutionary literary criticism; instead, it seeks to expose the
“relationship between cognitive predispositions, historical situations,
38
literary artifacts, and the aesthetic value of individual texts.” This is,
largely, the philosophy that informs this article, and it offers an im-
portant model for this special issue as a whole.
Human evolution is, for writers like Golding or—in the domain
of nonfiction—Salopek, something fundamentally problematic, and
not just due to gaps or limitations in scientific knowledge. Rather, the
spatio-temporal scale of evolutionary processes resists straightforward
capture in narrative form, because of what Monika Fludernik de-
scribes as the “anthropomorphic bias” of storytelling: narrative is not

36 Joseph Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” Style 42,
no. 2 & 3 (2008): 103–35; Jonathan Go schall, The Storytelling Animal: How Sto-
ries Make Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012).
37 Joseph Carroll et al., “Palaeolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nine-
teenth Century,” in Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Hu-
manities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2012), Kindle Locations 5997-98.
38 Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 35.

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