What is it about?

This brief essay is a "manifesto," part of a group of three invited from the editors (the other two are by Brian Boyd and Jonathan Gottschall). The idea was to marshal all the forms of evidence and logic that support the claim that all valid literary knowledge can and ultimately should be situated within the framework of evolutionary biology and evolutionary social science.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

I've been working on this theoretical project since the early 1990s. This manifesto is the most concise full explanation of the logic behind the project. It's conceptually dense but lucid and precise. It clearly enunciates the idea that converging lines of evidence are a central feature of scientific validity and illustrates that idea with a delineation of the disciplines in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities. It also makes a case for the axiomatic validity of an evolutionary perspective for all living things, including humans--hence also the products of human minds. Literature is one of those products.

Perspectives

The manifestos written by Brian Boyd and Jonathan Gottschall seek compromise between evolutionary perspectives and the perspectives of other theoretical schools. I argue that evolutionary biology is more comprehensive and has more scientific validity than any competing theory that deals with human behavior and experience.

Joseph Carroll

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: A rationale for evolutionary studies of literature, Scientific Study of Literature, May 2013, International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature,
DOI: 10.1075/ssol.3.1.03car.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page