Over at Crooked Timber (truly a trove of timely tidbits, as blogs go), Michael Bérubé offers some remarks on William Deriesiwicz’s Nation article discussing a voguish strain of literary criticism. This strain’s presiding deity is not T. S. Eliot or Jacques Derrida, but Charles Darwin. As the name suggests, Darwinian literary criticism approaches written texts not as expressive tours de force or as disingenuous significations, but as instruments conferring survival advantages to the species that has developed them.

Yes, that’s right: according to Darwinian literary critics, books are to humans what blow holes are to beluga whales or what wings are to bats.

Or so the theory goes. Joseph Carroll, literature professor at the University of Missouri–Saint Louis and Darwinian literary criticism’s most renowned exponent, assays in his Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature to forge a relationship between evolutionary biology and the humanities in his readings of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. The astute critic’s job, according to Carroll, is to interpret these authors’ works by considering their formal properties, themes, tones, points of view. From these the Darwinian-evolutionary critic gains, Carroll writes, a sense of

what literature is, what its functions are, and how it works in light of the larger consideration of how these formal properties lend themselves to the inclusive fitness, that is, the amount of fitness an individual induces in its genetic (or social) partners, of the human organism.

Literature satisfies a deep-seated need for cognitive order. It helps people negotiate particular life situations and thereby shows itself an indispensable concomitant of humankind’s evolution.

Such a view of literature’s function jars against conventional critical practice. Notions of “deep-seated needs for cognitive order” and “indispensable concomitants” smack of the sweetness-and-light pedantry the literature professors of the current generation worked hard to overthrow, believing the idea that literature made one a better person abetted an unjust, exploitative status quo. Hence these professors’ retreat to the airy redoubt of High Theory, where they could tie students minds into Gordian knots with their gallicized mummery.

This retreat, while perhaps shielding literature from charges of elitism, also shielded it from relevance. Trumpery and word games are fine in times of plenty. In times of lean, however, they’re but so many unnecessary extravagances. Deresiewicz adumbrates the situation in Darwinian terms:

The humanities … are undergoing their own struggle for survival within the academic ecosystem. Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated. As the Darwinists are quick to point out, a lot of this suffering is self-inflicted. In literary studies in particular, the last several decades have witnessed the baleful reign of “Theory,” a mash-up of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense. Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation — not exactly the highest of mental virtues — the rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural “difference,” is dead set against the notion of human universals. Theory has led literary studies into an intellectual and institutional cul-de-sac, and now that its own energies have been exhausted (the last major developments date to the early ‘90s), it has left it there.

Bérubé, however, doesn’t buy this. He finds that what literary Darwinists seek to restore — a sense of literature’s utility in modeling practical and ethical behavior which conduce to the human species success — is something theory-driven criticism has more or less already addressed. Theory-driven criticism already satisfies a deep-seated need for cognitive order, and already helps us negotiate particular situations. Bérubé points to the data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics as evidence for his claim. Addressing Deresiewicz, he writes:

All of these things are true: our budgets are shrinking, our faculty positions are being lost, and our institutional prestige has all but evaporated. All of these things are true, except the bit about the students.… English enrollments plummeted between 1970 and 1980, from 63,914 degrees to 31,922, and then rebounded thereafter, reaching the 50,000 mark in 1990 and hovering in that vicinity ever since. In other words, during the years when Theory was at its peak … the English major actually drew in tens of thousands of new students, some of whom may actually have liked the fact that their literature classes were places they could read and think and talk about gender and sexuality and textuality and even some of that power/knowledge flimflammery.

Bérubé’s rebuttal teases out the implicit value judgment in Deresiewicz’s assessment of literary studies’ current state: literature by nature edifies and instructs, while theory merely perplexes and demolishes. Bérubé adopts a more positivist attitude. All discourse, whether literary or theoretical, feeds back into the adaptive mechanism. In fact, literature and theory, when deployed in tandem, likely offer enhancements that neither could offer on its own. Literary Darwinists seeking to supplant theory-oriented critics actually stand to put the human species at a relative disadvantage by robbing it of a factor whose propaedeutic value is well established. Rather than redressing the perceived “abstruosities” of theory-driven criticism, Darwinist literary theory merely performs the Wittgensteinian function of describing what is already the case.

Ape and essence: a Darwinian literary critic plies his trade.

It’s difficult not to side with Bérubé on this point. But we at Generation Bubble fear that the entire debate threatens to become … well … an academic one. Journalist Chris Hedge’s forthcoming book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, might just prove the cold shower to the belletrists’ warm bath. The book’s description chills the blood:

Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies. One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.

One may, upon reading this description, simply dismiss Hedges’s book as another piece of alarmist cultural pessimism. Suppose, though, that there is something to Hedges’s thesis. What are we to conclude? From a Darwinian perspective, the problem is plain. Even if the Darwinian critical approach can only hope to describe, not evaluate, what it describes is frightening. Televisual and cinematic entertainment, the undisputed winners in today’s media, must, according to literary-Darwinist reasoning, play a role (and a huge one at that) in directing human evolution. What kind of cognitive order are they bringing to human minds? What behaviors do they encourage in human individuals so they may negotiate particular life situations? These questions members of the ever-shrinking literate minority must ask, because whatever instructive value literature — or, indeed, theory — has threatens to become imponderable for the vast majority of the citizenry.