A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

by Nancy Easterlin

Overview

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation.

Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities.

Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson’s “Old Barnard,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver’s “I Could See the Smallest Things.”

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421405049
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nancy Easterlin is a University Research Professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Orleans and author of Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion.”

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Literature, Science, and Biocultural Interpretation
Literature and Science?
The Emergence of "English" and the Two Cultures
What Is Consilience?
The "Unimaginable Complexity" of Interpretation
The Centrality of Interpretation: Glimpsing Knowledge
Are Art and Literature Adaptations?
What Is Literature For?
2. "It Is No Tale": Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ideology
Aesthetics under the Sign of Ideology
Narrative Knowing and Epistemic Constraints
Cognition, Modernization, and Aesthetic Transformation
Unknowing the Narrative Habit: Wordsworthian Configurations
Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tale
3. Minding Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinders and Natural Places
Mental Maps for Critical Footpaths
Constructing Minds
Constructing Environment
Constructing Place
Literary Constructions of Nature, Place, and Environment
No Place: Wide Sargasso Sea and Psychic Displacement
4. Remembering the Body: Feelings, Concepts, Process
Cognitivism in the Matrix of Experience
Multiple Cognitions
From Cognitive Rhetoric to Conceptual Blending
Cognition, Consciousness, and the Modern Mind
In the Literary Matrix: Cognitive Ecological Process
Vines and Vipers: Re-regulation in Coleridge's "Dejection"
Shrinking the Self: "I Could See the Smallest Things"
5. Endangered Daughters: Sex, Mating, and Power in Darwinian Feminist Perspective
The Emergence of Darwinian Literary Criticism
Whose Life History?
Wuthering Heights and the Social Emotions
Inbreeding Depression and Romantic Incest
Mating Strategies, Monogamy, and Sexual Equality
Quarry or Wife? The Proprietary Male and Relational Possibility in The Fox
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A thoughtful, authoritative, original work, striking out in a new direction that takes up several leading modes of inquiry along evolutionary and cognitive theoretical lines but arrives at a productive synthetic position of its own.
—Alan Richardson, Boston College, author of The Neural Sublime

Alan Richardson

A thoughtful, authoritative, original work, striking out in a new direction that takes up several leading modes of inquiry along evolutionary and cognitive theoretical lines but arrives at a productive synthetic position of its own.

— Alan Richardson, Boston College, author of The Neural Sublime

Editorial Reviews

Easterlin gives full-scale and valuable accounts of exemplary works.
—William Flesch, Times Literary Supplement

Easterlin offers scholars much food for thought.
—Choice

Easterlin has produced a masterful work that will guide a great deal of future work in and around these literary fields.
—Ashton Nichols, Wordsworth Circle

This engaged and thoughtful book contributes vitally to current thinking about the place of science, particularly cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology, in the study of literature. Easterlin's principles and critical practice achieve luminous clarity in her reading of Wordsworth.
—John Sitter, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

There is much to admire in Easterlin’s extraordinary synthesis of biocultural literary approaches; anyone working in the field as student or researcher will get a great deal of intellectual stimulation from her text.
—Gavin Miller, Modern Language Review

From the Publisher

Easterlin offers scholars much food for thought.

Choice

This engaged and thoughtful book contributes vitally to current thinking about the place of science, particularly cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology, in the study of literature. Easterlin's principles and critical practice achieve luminous clarity in her reading of Wordsworth.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment - John Sitter

Easterlin has produced a masterful work that will guide a great deal of future work in and around these literary fields.

Wordsworth Circle - Ashton Nichols

Easterlin gives full-scale and valuable accounts of exemplary works.

Times Literary Supplement - William Flesch

There is much to admire in Easterlin’s extraordinary synthesis of biocultural literary approaches; anyone working in the field as student or researcher will get a great deal of intellectual stimulation from her text.

Modern Language Review - Gavin Miller

Easterlin gives full-scale and valuable accounts of exemplary works.

— William Flesch

Times Literary Supplement