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

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation by Nancy Easterlin Mark Schiebe A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. By Nancy Easterlin. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 315 pp. Recent publications like Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal (2012) and Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories (2009) reflect a turn toward a biological approach to the study of narrative—a clear alternative to methodologies like semiotics and the New Historicism that have dominated literary studies over the past several decades—and one that seems to resonate with a broader, non-specialist audience as well. Nancy Easterlin, a leading scholar and advocate of cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature, has written a wide-ranging and thorough survey of contemporary theoretical developments in a range of fields she pulls together under the rubric of biocultural approaches. Her book is structured as a series of critical interventions in current debates on narratology, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches in the humanities, and Darwinian literary criticism. Easterlin’s elegant summaries of these areas, and her measured criticism and recommendations, make this book a valuable resource both for researchers new to biocultural literary theory and practicing scholars in one of these fields. Broadly defined, “A biocultural approach to literature … entails combining traditional humanist methods and research with aspects of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary social science that are relevant to the project at hand” (34). Despite being a strong advocate for interdisciplinarity, however, Easterlin is careful to emphasize the disjunctions as well as the conjunctions between the biological and the literary object of study; more generally, she is vigilant against the tendency toward scientific reductionism she sees in a host of empirical approaches to the arts. “As the products of individual consciousnesses that reach fruition when their material instantiations are apprehended by other consciousnesses, [literary texts] are rather unlike cells produced by the blind process of natural selection or complex organisms with an intentionality of their own” (22). Literature may be a product of the brains of highly evolved animals, but if acts of reading must begin with the basic fact [End Page 161] of our animal nature, they must also recognize the “unimaginable complexity” involved in the act of interpretation, which in her view is still the central task of the literary critic (20). Easterlin uses the hybridity of the term “biocultural” as a kind of double-edged corrective, a way, for example, to remind cognitivists of the embodied nature of language, and to push ecocritics toward a richer awareness of the culturally-constructed nature of concepts like “Animal” and “Environment.” “Most critically,” she writes, “biocultural criticism, as I envision it, does not employ an a priori model that it presumes has application to the vast majority of literary texts” (34). In her chapter “It is No Tale: Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ideology,” Easterlin lays out the case for the biological basis of narrative. She argues that literary critics and theorists need to more seriously consider the implications of scientific research demonstrating that our cognitive bias toward narrativity, so crucial in the development of human language and culture, “arose to assist adaptation to a far different environment from the one we now inhabit” (46). For early humans, thinking in storylike sequences was a vital means of survival, as it “facilitated interpretation of events and promoted functional action” (47). This genetic predisposition remains with us today, even if it’s more difficult for modern man to appreciate that stories were once a matter of life and death. An approach to literary aesthetics grounded in the understanding that narrative fulfills a profound biological need should help to redress the damage done by a generation of poststructuralists and New Historicists who suspected that aesthetic response was merely an effect (and affect) generated by political ideology, a position Easterlin fears has become near hegemonic in the profession. Despite her refusal to subsume aesthetics “under the sign of ideology,” as she puts it, Easterlin’s comparative analysis of comic ballads by Wordsworth and Mary Darby Robinson serves in part to point out the pitfalls of an approach to narratology that ignores ideology altogether. Because research in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology has demonstrated “the disturbingly suasive...