Downloads

Footnotes: 1. Patricia Cohen, ‘Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know’, New York Times, March 31st 2010, accessed online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all on 5th April 2012. 2. ‘Evolutionary psychology’ sometimes includes or draws on ‘cognitive science’ and/ or ‘neuroscience’. In this article we will be focussing on the claims made for each of these fields within specific arguments rather than offering generalised definitions of any of these areas. 3. It is not within the remit of this article to debate exactly from what time this interest did originate, as this origin can – and has – been located at many different points, ranging from nineteenth-century ideas of heredity and phrenology, to Charles Darwin’s writings in and of themselves, to developments in evolutionary psychology of which Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose wrote in 2000 that they had ‘grown dramatically’ ‘[o]ver the last ten years’ (Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, ‘Introduction’ to Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 2001), pp, 1-14, p. 1), to Jonathan Kramnick’s observation that the ‘[a]cademic year 2008–2009 was something of a watershed moment for literary Darwinism, marked by the twin publication of Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York, 2009) […] and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).’ (Jonathan Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2011, 315-47, 315). 4. Steven Pinker, The Blank State (London/New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 417. 5. This New York Times article is mentioned as a ‘sign of the times’ in this sense by Jonathan Kramnick in his interview on 29th February 2012 for the Blog site ‘New Apps: Arts, Politics, Philosophy, Science’, see at: http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/02/new-apps-interview-jonathan-kramnick.html accessed on 5th April 2012. 6. Tom Panelas, ‘Review of Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia’, American Journal of Sociology, 87:6 (May, 1982), 1425-1427, 1426-7. 7. An indication of the growing interest in these areas specifically in relation to children’s literature may be gleaned from the forthcoming, new series (from 2012) ‘Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition’, edited by Nina Christensen, Elina Druker, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Maria Nikolajeva and published by John Benjamins in Amsterdam. 8. Kramnick. ‘Against Literary Darwinism’, 316-17. 9. David S. Miall and Ellen Dissanayake, ‘The Poetics of Babytalk’, Human Nature, 14:4, 2003, 337-64, 340, 338. 10. Miall and Dissanayake, ‘The Poetics of Babytalk’, 337. 11. Olga Solomon, ‘Rethinking Babytalk’, in: eds Allesandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin, The Handbook of Language Socialization, series Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 121-50, p. 121. 12. Joseph Carroll and other Literary Darwinists repeatedly make claims of this kind. Just one small example is when Carroll reflects on how ‘I had already been working for a couple of years at reconstructing literary theory from the ground up-trying to rescue it from the postmodernists’ in ‘What is Literary Darwinism? An Interview with Joseph Carroll’, Neuronarrative, February 27th 2009, accessed on 13th April 2012 at: http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/what-is-literary-darwinism-an-interview-with-joseph-carroll/ 13. Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative’, Poetics Today, 32:1, Spring 2011, 55-79. 14. See, for a further elaboration of this argument, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Motherhood and Evolutionary Psychology or: The Triumph of Capitalism’, forthcoming. 15. Daniela Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory: Childhood, Affect, Critical Thought’, Feminist Theory, 11:3, 2010, 241-54, 243-4 (italics in original). 16. Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 244. 17. Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 241. 18. Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 247, referring to Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, eds, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982). 19. Miall and Dissanayake, ‘The Poetics of Babytalk’, 344. 20. Brian Boyd, ‘The Origin of Stories: Horton Hears a Who’, Philosophy and Literature, 25: 2, October 2001,197-214 (italics in original) 21. Miall and Dissanayake, ‘The Poetics of Babytalk’, 343. 22. Miall and Dissanayake, ‘The Poetics of Babytalk’, footnote 4, 357. 23. It is not possible within the scope of these footnotes to reference entire fields of research, so I will necessarily have to limit myself here to giving some salient examples. See for the issues around ‘babytalk’ for instance: Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin, ‘Language Acquisition and Socialization. Three Developmental Stories and their Implications’ in: eds Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, In Culture Theory. Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 276-320; Solomon, ‘Rethinking Babytalk’ op. cit.; for issues around the oral and the written, Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy, Special Issue Editor: Dan Ben-Amos, 123: 490, Fall 2010; for childhood studies, Jens Qvortrup, Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994); Jens Qvortrup (ed.), Studies in Modern Childhood: Society, Agency, Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005); Chris Jenks (ed.), The Sociology of Childhood: Essential Readings (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1982); Chris Jenks, Childhood (series: Key Ideas, series ed. Peter Hamilton) (London: Routledge, 1996); Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: The Falmer Press, 1990, second edition 1997); Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985, republished with a new preface by Princeton University Press, 1994); for critiques of the brain as modular: Annette Karmiloff-Smith, ‘Why Babies’ Brains Are Not Swiss Army Knives’ in: eds Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, Alas Poor Darwin. Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 144-57; Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself. Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (London: Penguin, 2007); for a critique of genes as determinate and ‘innate’: Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution. How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance (London: Icon Books, 2012); for debates about what constitutes ‘literary’ language or ‘poetics’, Zohar Shavit, Poetics of Children's Literature (The University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1986); Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, revised edition 1975, orig. pub. 1956); Colin MacCabe, ‘Language, Linguistics and the Study of Literature’ in his Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 113-31. 24. Dissanayake, ‘Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative’, 56. 25. See for one example of the ongoing debates playing out around this paradox: Journal of American Folklore, Special Issue: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy. 26. Dissanayake, ‘Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative’, 55 (our italics). 27. Dissanayake, ‘Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative’, 69. Dissayanake’s claim of the relative neglect of this field contrasts notably with that by one of the founders of the field of orality studies, Erik Havelock, when he writes that ‘readers of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) who consult the extensive bibliography of that work will notice the meager list of relevant publications in this field preceding 1962 and the flood that then sets in in the years following.’ Erik Havelock, ‘The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind’ in eds David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Literacy and Orality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 11-27, p. 12. 28. Barbara Wall, The Narrator’s Voice. The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 2-3. 29. Wall, The Narrator’s Voice, p. 207. 30. Roderick McGillis, The Nimble Reader. Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), p.206. 31. Jonathan Kramnick, Against Literary Darwinism’ and ‘Literary Studies in Science: A Reply to my Critics’, Critical Inquiry, 38 (Winter 2012), 431 – 460. 32. Boyd, 197. 33. There have been attempts to read Darwin as embracing recapitulation theory, see Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) and ‘Ideology and the History of Science’, Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), 103–8, but these remain controversial, see Peter J. Bowler, Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also B. K. Hall, ‘Ontogeny Does Not Recapitulate Phylogeny, It Creates Phylogeny’, Evolution and Development, 13:4 (2011), 401–4. Not only does Boyd fail to engage with this debate, and the question of recapitulation within Darwin’s work, he seems to regard it as an accepted fact within contemporary science. 34. Problematically, ‘outline’ and ‘colour’ are themselves implicated in the evolutionary narrative. It is suggested that what is attractive in art is precisely the outline, whilst red, black and white and one primary colour are attractive to children, because the first three were utilised by early humans. See Boyd, 204. 35. See Boyd, 198 and 199-200: We understand the notion of the animal precursor to art to be particularly problematic in its formulation: ‘Corvids […] enjoy a kind of aerial acrobatics that Lorenz unashamedly labels art’. If there is an ‘enjoyment’ of ‘acrobatics’, then, of course, there is little shame in labelling this ‘art’. And if Dolphins are understood to engage in ‘a kind of rhythmic gymnastics in which they deploy air bubbles from their blowholes like gymnast’s ribbons or hoops’, then there is no reason for this to be understood as anything but an artistic precursor (Boyd, 199). 36. Ibid., 203. 37. Ibid., 197. 38. Ibid., 203. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 204. 42. Ibid. Boyd refers to ‘Dr. Seuss’, ‘Theodor Seuss Geisel’ and ‘Ted Geisel’. Although, at one stage Ted Geisel is used as a personal, rather than authorial name, we do not read this distinction to be sustained, so have chosen to stay with Dr. Seuss. 43. The ‘spirit’ of play is also worth considering. We read the spirit as what cannot be contested, as that which is not written. It is, according to the narrator, simply known by all involved in ‘play’. For an example of a comparable appeal see, for example, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein’s analysis of the Lutheran ‘Spirit of God’in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon: 1994), pp. 56-65. 44. Boyd, 204. 45. This also assumes book-reading itself as a universal. For problems with this, see, for example, Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Second Edition, (London and New York: Routledge: 2008), p. 192. 46. Boyd, 205. 47. See, for one of many examples, Boyd, 200. 48. Boyd, 201. 49. Kramnick, ‘Literary Studies in Science: A Reply to my Critics’, 434. 50. Here we are thinking specifically of the reading of the future in Jacques Derrida (trans. Peggy Kamuf) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994). 51. There are a number of further issues here, in point of fact, although it is beyond the scope of this article to engage with them all. First amongst these, perhaps, are the notions of predisposition and precursors. Again, this is an area that Kramnick analyses at length. He argues, for example, that his original essay looked more at the claim that a disposition to attend to or create stories or fictions or in looser formulations, imply literature, is itself an adaptation. My argument was that literary Darwinism had a difficult time specifying what about this disposition conferred a reproductive advantage long ago. The trouble was a kind of limit in principle. Literary forms exhibit design of all kinds, of course, but only the weakest analogy would maintain that such design has the features of a trait selected for survival. We have no sense if any feature of literary design responded to any selection pressure, in the Pleistocene or after. As evidence for this, I pointed to the scattering of arguments for adaptive function provided by evolutionary inclined critics themselves. No one function appears to agree with the other, and all could be performed by something else. (Kramnick, ‘Literary Studies in Science: A Reply to my Critics’, 445). 52. Boyd, 201. 53. If the evolutionary imperative is sometimes hidden, if our action are sometimes ‘compulsive’, (Boyd, 199), and certain stimuli can ‘grab us instantaneously, like a reflex’, (Boyd, 200), it is also that which works on the surface of the mind, a matter of strategy, that which, indeed, is known even as compulsion. 54. Boyd, 203. 55. Boyd, 207. 56. The ethical turn is read in detail by Kramnick: ‘in place of […] explanation literary Darwinism often shifts register to the thematic or moral, whether that is reading for content that would comport with its view of human nature or defining the function of literary fictions as virtuous or ennobling’, (‘Literary Studies in Science: A Reply to my Critics’, 436). 57. Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 251. 58. Caselli, ‘Kindergarten Theory’, 251.