Literary Darwinism explains culture

Riki Tanaka / the current Joseph Carroll, Curators’ Professor of English, is one of the leading authorities on Darwinian literary theory. He published the novels “The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold”; “Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism”; “Evolution and Literary Theory”; and “Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.”

Joseph Carroll is a curator’s professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His main field of study reaches into a relatively new field known as Literary Darwinism.

The Current: What is the focal point of your most recent publication?

Joseph Carroll: The publication which received the most attention, the one in the messenger, is actually a journal I recently started to co-edit with Alice Andrews, called “The Evolutionary Review: Arts, Science, Culture.” The idea is to demonstrate that the evolutionary view can be used to illuminate every aspect of life and culture.

TC: What other notable works have you published?

JC: I’ve published multiple works on the topic of Literary Darwinism since the mid ‘90s. Among these are “Evolution and Literary Theory,” and an edition of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” I also published several essays in this time which were collected in 2004 in a book called “Literary Darwinism.” The title of that book became the name of the entire movement I am a part of.

TC: What would you say has been your largest project in this field of study?

JC: For the last six years, my main project has been a book with three other people. We put a questionnaire on the web, including over 2,000 characters from English novels. Professors around the world have been asked to pick out a character and fill out questionnaires regarding them. I’m helping to draft a book from this called “Graphing Jane Austen: Paleolithic Politics and British Novels of the 19th Century.” We were studying role assignments: protagonists and antagonists. We discovered that the main pattern was simple. The antagonists were oriented specifically towards dominance and greed. Protagonists, however, were co-operational, self-effacing, etc.

TC: So, this research project ties in heavily with Literary Darwinism as well. How does Literary Darwinism relate this study to culture?

JC: In tribal cultures, people spent a lot of time suppressing dominance: if anyone got too big for his britches, they were brought down. We believe novels of the 19th century create imaginative patterns which serve the same function: they suppress dominance and encourage egalitarian behaviors. We published a few articles out of this, which were picked up by a journal called “New Scientist.” This caught people’s fancy, and it became a popular story, spreading through newspapers around the world. England, Ireland, India and Russia have all covered the study. It’s all statistics, correlating motives, personality characteristics, and role assignments. People can look at these novels and realize that they are related to human evolutionary behavior.

TC: So, it would seem the movement has really been taking off lately. How did it get started, and what are the implications of this study on the future of literary study?

JC: Once you get a knack for this thought pattern, it’s interesting to think about how it’s influenced humanity from ancient history through our modern culture. Again, this started as a fringe movement. Those doing this research were doing so in isolation. They gradually realized others were involved, however, one of the important things to know about this approach is that it’s a major force in bridging the gap between the two cultures: literature and science. Literary people don’t tend to know much about science and vice-versa. This new approach to analyzing the impacts of literature upon society may help in producing more well-rounded students of both science and literature in the future.