The Centrality of the Exceptional in Literary Study
Ellen Spolsky · Style · 2008
I am confused about Joseph Carroll's we. Citing his own earlier work, Carroll notes that he once admitted that do not yet a full and adequate conception of human nature. This may be no more than a variation of one--anyone. But then I read that, time having passed, Carroll himself is now able to lay out a of human nature that incorporates the features on which most practitioners in the field would agree. He does this in 1600 words. Does he consider himself of the community of practitioners? Or are they the community of scientists and social scientists who are trained in those fields? If the second, and that seems more likely, by what authority does he ask us to accept as accurate or useful his summary of a field that is neither his nor ours? Beyond my general ability to follow rational argument, how can I evaluate the claims made therein? The most surprising is the claim that he reports finding a model. Am I being asked to believe that although my own academic area of literary theory is cross-hatched by contested claims, the field of evolution and evolutionary psychology is blissfully free of conflict and competition? Especially when it comes to a (of all things!) of human nature? I am being asked to believe in Tinkerbell. Speaking as who is quite interested in the scientific fields of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, I must protest that it is entirely unreasonable for literary scholars to be asked to build their own work on a homogenized summary of a field they are not trained to critique, in which they are not trained to recognize overgeneralizations from data, to spot weak or faulty research assumptions, to notice the lack of or poorly defined control groups, or the misplaced use of statistical models. It is, indeed, ridiculous for literary scholars to include themselves within the we who now have a of human since, as even an amateur reading of the weekly New York Times science page repeatedly demonstrates, claims about the universals of human nature remain well beyond consensus. While I leave it to others to point out how much of Carroll's model consists of unproven, even unprovable hypotheses, most still actively in dispute, Carroll knows perfectly well that his summary is inadequate for any purpose beyond piquing the interest of the uninformed. He acknowledges this by providing an example of a professional use of these scientific fields for the study of literature, the work of Brian Boyd, whom he praises for expertise in assimilating information from the social sciences; Boyd, are meant to understand, does his homework. With explicit and detailed reference to evolutionary social science, Boyd demonstrates that the findings of cognitive psychology make sense ultimately because they are embedded in the findings of evolutionary psychology. To be professional, on this view, is to assimilate (which I take to mean accept and adopt) the claims of two fields in which you are not trained to be a critical reader! And Carroll hasn't even had time to mention the exciting developments in systems biology, clearly relevant as a third field underpinning whatever ultimately emerges as a description of human nature, but also a field in which competing hypotheses are vigorously argued. I was about to submit, then, as my first complaint, that Carroll is asking us to adopt as guiding principles his versions of what two or three scientific fields are about, ignoring the quite reasonable and normal controversy within them about both basic principles and about details. We must do this, I infer, even though as literary scholars none of the training that would be needed for us to make properly critical use of their conclusions, because this is the way will be able to generate new knowledge about literature. I am stopped from advancing this criticism, however, because just as he asks us to make this commitment, Carroll notes that there is one crucial element of human nature [that] remains at least partially outside this consensus and that is 'the disposition for producing and consuming literature and the other arts. …