Joseph Carroll | University of Missouri - St. Louis (original) (raw)

Books by Joseph Carroll

We set up a questionnaire on the web in which we listed about 2,000 characters from 200 19th-cent... more We set up a questionnaire on the web in which we listed about 2,000 characters from 200 19th-century British novels. Approximately 519 people filled out 1,470 questionnaires on 435 characters from 144 novels. Each questionnaire contained questions about the character's motives and personality and about the respondent's emotional responses to the character. Respondents also identified characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters. We hypothesized that the contrast between protagonists and antagonists would display the ethos of the novels as a whole. We conclude that the novels are designed to stigmatize dominance behavior and to promote an ethos of self-effacing cooperation. That is the same ethos that anthropologist Christopher Boehm identifies in hunter-gatherer culture. We infer that the novels fulfill the same kind of social function that gossip performs in hunter-gatherer cultures. The novels form a medium through which readers affirm their membership within a cooperative community.

Essays collected between 2005 and 2010. The essays include efforts in constructive literary theor... more Essays collected between 2005 and 2010. The essays include efforts in constructive literary theory, theoretical polemics, practical literary criticism, quantitative literary study, and intellectual history. The constructive theory includes (1) a model of human nature that integrates basic motives, basic emotions, and features of individual identity; (2) a theory of literary meaning as the interplay of perspectives among authors, readers, and characters; and (3) arguments on the adaptive function of literature and the other arts. Polemics include analysis of the underlying motives and assumptions in both traditional humanism and poststructuralism. There are two essays in quantitative literary study, both from a website questionnaire study on the organization of characters in 19th-century British novels. One summarizes results of the study as a whole. The other offers a quantitative analysis of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. There are three essays in intellectual history: "The Power of Darwin's Vision," "The Science Wars in a Long View," and "A Darwinian Revolution in the Humanities." Subjects of practical criticism include The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, and Hamlet,

Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and wo... more Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric, Stephen Jay Gould, and narrow-school evolutionary psychology; offering examples of practical criticism of nineteenth-century British novels and novels depicting paleolithic life.

I integrate evolutionary biology with ideas from the traditional humanist paradigm; critique post... more I integrate evolutionary biology with ideas from the traditional humanist paradigm; critique poststructuralism and construct a biocultural alternative; critique many individual theorists (with the most extensive attention given to Derrida, Foucault, and Northrop Frye); and critique narrow forms of evolutionary psychology. Main constructive influences include Darwin and Huxley, ethologist Konrad Lorenz, developmental psychologist John Bowlby, and personality psychologist Hans Eysenck.

Argues that Stevens is essentially a religious poet working in the Romantic, visionary tradition.... more Argues that Stevens is essentially a religious poet working in the Romantic, visionary tradition. Delineates his imaginative trajectory as a visionary quest culminating in the late poems of The Auroras of Autumn.

Delineates the trajectory of Arnold's intellectual life and locates his work in relation to Europ... more Delineates the trajectory of Arnold's intellectual life and locates his work in relation to European cultural theory and British neo-classicism.

Papers by Joseph Carroll

Critical Insights: Family, edited by John Knapp (Ipswich, MA: EBSCO, 2012): 83-103.

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford , 2012

Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experi... more Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and more importantly, in the interpretation of depicted events: in the author's treatment of the depicted events; the reader's response to both the depicted events and the author's treatment; and the author's anticipation of the reader's responses. This chapter outlines possible stances toward violence, makes an argument for the decisive structural significance of violence in both life and literature, and then presents a representative sampling of violent acts in literature. The examples from literature are organized into the main kinds of human relationships: one's relation to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and marital partners; family members (parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities (violence within social groups); and warfare (violence between social groups).

Philosophy and Literature, 2005

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. Fi... more Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is.

Philosophy and Literature, 2008

Abstract: Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding ... more Abstract: Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering Heights, delineate the norms Brontë shares with her projected audience, analyze her divided impulses, and explain the generic forms in which those impulses manifest themselves. Brontë herself presupposes a folk understanding of human nature in her audience.

Evolution of Violence, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (New York: Springer, 2013) 33-52.

People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of... more People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of others. Literature contains much violence because violence reveals the underlying conflicts in all social relationships. Evolutionary psychology offers the best explanatory framework for understanding social conflicts, but evolutionary psychology is still in the process of formulating theories about the way core motives interact with specific cultural constructs. To explain the significance of violence in particular works of literature, critics must analyze the interactions between human life history, specific cultural values, individual differences in authorial vision, and relations between the minds of authors and readers in response to characters. This chapter offers examples of that kind of analysis for three works of literature: Grimms’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf,” and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The analysis of “Little Red Riding Hood” identifies fear of predation and fear of strangers as core concerns in the story and examines the way symbolic images affect the emotions of child readers. The analysis of “The Werewolf” contrasts the author’s relations with characters and audience in that story with the authors’ relations with characters and audience in the other two works. The analysis of King Lear contrasts the emotional effects of tragedy with the emotional effects of action movies, identifies normative human universals as the basis for audience response, examines the way characters in the play and critics of the play seek meaning through religious ideas, contrasts religious ideas with Shakespeare’s naturalistic world view, and argues that intuitive insights into human life history form the moral core of the play.

Style 46.2 (2012): 129-60.

The evolutionary human sciences are still in the process of forming a paradigm. Their model of hu... more The evolutionary human sciences are still in the process of forming a paradigm. Their model of human nature is not yet complete because it has not yet taken adequate account of the experience that forms the subject matter of the humanities. This essay is designed to help correct that deficiency. In the first part of the essay, I explain how scholars in the humanities can help construct the still developing model of human nature. In the second part, I argue that the proper subject of literary commentary is “meaning” and that meaning can be localized in the interaction of perspectives in authors, readers, and characters. In the third part, I argue that the main categories of human life history are also the main themes of fiction. In the final section, I offer suggestions about directions for future research.

The Routledge Companion to Emotion in Literature, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan (New York: Routledge), 2022

For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to... more For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives and tonal qualities in individual literary works and literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions can now improve significantly on the insights available to folk psychology. It can provide scientifically valid categories for analyzing the subjects depicted in literature and the emotional configurations that make them meaningful. The dozens of emotions identified in empirical research can be organized and explained by an evolutionary understanding of human motives, developmental phases, neurological systems, and specifically human forms of cognitive and social development. This chapter organizes emotions in eight categories and uses those categories to outline several sets of genres characterized by the emotions they contain and evoke. Commentary on Jack London's "To Build a Fire" illustrates the interaction of emotions in characters, authors, and readers.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

This is a chapter in EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGINATIVE CULTURE, edited by Mathias Clasen, ... more This is a chapter in EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGINATIVE CULTURE, edited by Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, and me. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how imaginative verbal artifacts are produced by the imagination and in turn influence the imagination. Assimilating recent neuroscientific research on the evolution of modern brain shape and on the brain’s default mode network, we can now say with confidence that the imagination is a neurological reality, that it is lodged in specific parts of the brain, that it consists of an identifiable set of components and processes, that these components and processes have adaptive functions, and that in fulfilling its functions imagination has been a major causal factor in making Homo sapiens the dominant species on earth. The first section of the chapter defines the main terms in this argument. The second section describes the evolution of modern brain shape and suggests the role imagination has played in producing the complex of behaviors that characterize neurologically modern Homo sapiens. The third section describes the current neuroscientific understanding of the brain’s default mode network—the neurological locus of imagination. The fourth section describes three core processes of imagination used in constructing imaginative verbal artifacts: simulation, mental time travel, and perspective taking (also known as “Theory of Mind” and “mentalizing”). The three processes are illustrated with reference to a modern American novel, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The fifth section describes four specialized forms of imagination that deploy the core processes: dreaming, mind-wandering, autobiographical narratives, and counterfactual thinking. That section explains how these forms are involved in writing or reading literature and identifies a few literary works that illustrate them. The final section sums up the argument for the adaptive functions of literature.

Review of General Psychology, 2018

This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and mean... more This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that includes the whole scope of human behavior.
In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve three sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to help create different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.
Keywords: perspective taking, motives, psychology of reading, biocultural theory, evolutionary literary theory

Evolutionary Perspectives on Death, 2019

This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illus... more This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illustrates this framework with reference to specific literary works. The framework makes use of ideas from evolutionary psychology, human life history theory, terror management theory, the psychology of meaning, the psychology of fiction, and evolutionary literary theory. The chapter explains why humans create literary depictions of death, describes how imaginative meaning works in literature, characterizes the emotions evoked in literary depictions of death, and characterizes the attitudes toward death adopted by authors and characters. After constructing this theoretical framework, the chapter gives examples of literature that describe the whole span of an individual human life, then critiques three short stories that focus on specific themes in human life history. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates survival as a motive. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” illustrates death in childhood. D. H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” illustrates death in an intimate pair bond. A final section describes the state of research in the main fields that have contributed to the theoretical framework and suggests directions for further development.

A Companion to Literary Theory, edited by David Richter (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell), 2018

The author identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness... more The author identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness for literary study, and explains how they offer alternatives to current major forms of literary theory. He identifies the historical provenance and main contentions in evolutionary literary theory, and discusses the institutional position of evolutionary literary scholars. After describing the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts, the author proposes a synthesis of multiple hypotheses, delineates the scope of evolutionary literary criticism, and describes one large-scale study that integrates methods from the social sciences and literary criticism. The conclusion offers reflections on the future of evolutionary literary study.

Handbook on Evolution and Society: Toward an Evolutionary Social Science, edited by Jonathan H. Turner, Richard Machalek, and Alexandra Maryanski (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2015): 572-608., 2015

Within the past few years, theoretical biology, evolutionary social science, and evolutionary lit... more Within the past few years, theoretical biology, evolutionary social science, and evolutionary literary study have been correcting basic mistakes, producing new concepts, and reaching a more complete and adequate understanding of human behavior, including cultural and literary behavior. This chapter integrates these new concepts and demonstrates how they can be used to understand specific literary works. Separate sections are devoted to ideas from theoretical biology about the sources of cooperation in all living things, to ideas from the social sciences about human social organization, to ideas from evolutionary aesthetics about the adaptive function of the arts, and to ideas from literary theory about how meaning works in fiction. A section discussing specific literary examples illustrates the way the arts help generate group identity, integrate individuals into groups, and mediate between the needs of individuals and the claims of groups. Seven concepts from the research on evolved human sociality are used to organize the literary examples: dominance, reverse dominance, internalized norms, leadership, strong reciprocity, legal institutions, and legitimacy.

Critical Insights: Family, edited by John Knapp (Ipswich, MA: EBSCO, 2012): 83-103.

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford , 2012

Philosophy and Literature, 2005

Philosophy and Literature, 2008

Evolution of Violence, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen (New York: Springer, 2013) 33-52.

Style 46.2 (2012): 129-60.

The Routledge Companion to Emotion in Literature, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan (New York: Routledge), 2022

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

Review of General Psychology, 2018

Evolutionary Perspectives on Death, 2019

A Companion to Literary Theory, edited by David Richter (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell), 2018

Handbook on Evolution and Society: Toward an Evolutionary Social Science, edited by Jonathan H. Turner, Richard Machalek, and Alexandra Maryanski (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2015): 572-608., 2015

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2017

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into... more How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the " science wars " over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines.

Style 47.1 (2013): 87-118.

Style, 2010

I use Hamlet to test the proposition that evolutionary psychology can advance on the common under... more I use Hamlet to test the proposition that evolutionary psychology can advance on the common understanding embodied in the best of traditional humanist criticism. I develop Bradley's insight into Hamlet's depression by assimilating recent research into the neurophysiology of depression.

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 2017

Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interact... more Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parent-ing, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology , culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent , collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the... more The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the subjects traditionally studied in the humanities—is that part of culture that consists in shared and transmissible mental experiences that are aesthetically and emotionally modulated. Such experiences include religion, ideology, and the arts. Evolutionary cultural theory has heretofore concerned itself mostly with technology and social organization. Imaginative culture is the last major piece in the puzzle of human nature. After describing the historical and disciplinary context for this volume and summarizing its contents, the introduction describes a toolkit of concepts and methods used by the authors in this volume: Tinbergen’s four categories of ethological analysis (phylogeny, ontogeny, mechanism, and adaptive function), cross-species comparison, cross-cultural comparison, and the psychology of individual identity. Under the category “mechanism,” subheadings include neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the psychology of emotion. These concepts and methods are used as categories for describing subjects, observations, and arguments in the various chapters of the volume. “Directions for Further Research” identifies subject areas that have as yet received little attention from evolutionary scholars and scientists, describes opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative research, and discusses the tension between institutional disciplinary inertia and the impulses of advancing knowledge.

Translation of Reading Human Nature, 2023

This is an introduction to a forthcoming Farsi translation of Reading Human Nature: Literary Darw... more This is an introduction to a forthcoming Farsi translation of Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice, which was published in 2011. I compare the essays in Reading Human Nature with my work in evolutionary literary study published before and after 2011. Five main forms of effort are used to characterize all these publications: (1) fashioning theoretical structures, (2) developing specifically evolutionary methods for interpretive criticism, (3) combining interpretive criticism with statistical analyses of data on readers’ responses to characters in novels, (4) engaging polemically with competing ideas about human nature and imaginative culture, and (5) filling in conceptual categories with empirically derived information on subjects such as motives, emotions, sociality, and imagination.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2022

This is an overview of the 20 articles published as a "Research Topic" in Frontiers in Psychology... more This is an overview of the 20 articles published as a "Research Topic" in Frontiers in Psychology. The "editorial" identifies the main concepts in an evolutionary understanding of imaginative culture and points toward two main areas in which researchers need to come up to speed: neuroscientific work on the Default Mode Network, and current evolutionary research on emotions.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2022

This is a collection of 21 articles published as an eBook by Frontiers in Psychology. This Re... more This is a collection of 21 articles published as an eBook by Frontiers in Psychology.

This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its manifestations but unified by species-typical sets of biologically grounded motives, emotions, and cognitive dispositions. The topic encompasses four main areas of research in the evolutionary human sciences: (1) evolutionary psychology and anthropology, which have fashioned a robust model of evolved human motives organized systemically within the phases and relationships of human life history; (2) research on gene-culture coevolution, which has illuminated the mechanisms of social cognition and the transmission of cultural information; (3) the psychology of emotions and affective neuroscience, which have gained precise knowledge about the evolutionary basis and neurological character of the evolved emotions that give power to the arts, religion, and ideology; and (4) cognitive neuroscience, which has identified the Default Mode Network as the central neurological location of the human imagination. By integrating these four areas of research and by demonstrating their value in illuminating specific kinds of imaginative culture, this Research Topic aims at incorporating imaginative culture within an evolutionary conception of human nature.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutiona... more This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas:
Imagination:

Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions
Myth and Religion
Aesthetic Theory
Music
Visual and Plastic Arts
Video Games and Films
Oral Narratives and Literature

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media.

A journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, po... more A journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, popular culture, religion, ideology, politics. Two volumes per year. Double-blind peer review. Regularly publishes multiple book reviews in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities.

This volume gives evidence for the unity of knowledge in evolutionary biology, the evolutionary s... more This volume gives evidence for the unity of knowledge in evolutionary biology, the evolutionary social sciences, and the humanities. It contains 14 separately authored essays, a foreword by Alice Dreger, a theoretical introduction by Joseph Carroll, and afterwords by David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Gottschall. Edward O. Wilson, Christopher Boehm, Herbert Gintis, Michael Rose, and Henry Harpending discuss human social evolution. Barbara Oakley integrates psychology and engineering. Dan P. McAdams delineates a model of human identity, and Carroll and his collaborators use a similar model for a quantitative study of Victorian novels. Ellen Dissanayake and John Hawks probe the mystery behind the markings ancestral humans made on stones. Brian Boyd uses cognitive psychology to analyze poetry and comics. Catherine Salmon and Mathias Clasen use evolutionary psychology to explain salient genres of popular culture: horror fiction, professional wrestling, romance novels, and male adventure novels.

An anthology of essays and book excerpts, most of them previously published; designed as a comple... more An anthology of essays and book excerpts, most of them previously published; designed as a complete package that could be used as the core for a course on evolution, literature, and film; contains sections on evolutionary biology; evolutionary literary theory; the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts; essays in interpretive criticism; and exercises in empirical literary study. The introduction is co-authored by the three editors.

The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introductio... more The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introduction, substantial selections from other works by Darwin (letters, autobiography, Descent of Man, etc.); background works (Lyell, Malthus, Lamarck, Spencer, Huxley, et al.),and a guide to authors cited by Darwin.

Special Evolutionary Issue of the online journal Politics and Culture. Edited by Joseph Carroll. ... more Special Evolutionary Issue of the online journal Politics and Culture. Edited by Joseph Carroll.

http://politicsandculture.org/2010/04/28/contents-2/

27 essays organized under five headings: (1) The Evolutionary Turn in Psychology and the Humanities; (2) Politics and Ethics; (3) Religion; (4) Literature; and (5) music.

Also, a symposium on the question "How is art biological," with commentaries by seven scholars and with responses from various contributors to each of the commentaries.

First third of the first volume, 2010, Co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll

co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2022

These two books on fictional narratives and neuroscience adopt cultural constructivist perspectiv... more These two books on fictional narratives and neuroscience adopt cultural constructivist perspectives that reject the idea of evolved human motives and emotions. Both books contain information that could be integrated with other research in a comprehensive and empirically grounded theory of narrative, but they both fail to construct any such theory. In order to avoid subordinating the humanities to the sciences, Comer and Taggart avoid integrating their separate disciplines: neuroscience (Comer) and narrative theory (Taggart). They draw no significant conclusions from the research they summarize. Armstrong subordinates neuroscience to the paradoxes of phenomenology and 4E cognition. His prose develops not by consecutive reasoning but by the repetitive intonation of paradoxical formulas. The failures in theoretical construction displayed by these two books run parallel with weaknesses in the interpretive criticism with which they illustrate their ideas. The different ways in which the books fail are sometimes comical but nonetheless instructive. The failures inadvertently point toward the radical changes in humanist thinking that would be necessary for success in integrating neuroscience and narrative theory.

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2021

Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it ... more Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's therapeutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that identifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and understanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuroscience to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher's chains of reasoning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletcher's book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher's rhetorical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher's book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.

Style, 2015

abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isol... more abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isolate elementary causal forces and organize them systematically. The elements of a usable model for evolved human sociality have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. The central idea in a usable model of human sociality is that the identity of the social group is integral to individual identity. In addition to that one central idea, a minimum of seven concepts is necessary to construct a model of sociality that includes the complex forms of organization in post-agricultural societies: (1) dominance, (2) egalitarianism or reverse dominance, (3) leadership, (4) internalized norms, (5) strong reciprocity or third-party enforcement of norms, (6) legal institutions, and (7) legitimacy in the exercise of power. These seven concepts can be reduced to four components: power, values, individuals, and groups. This model of evolved human sociality moves beyond the inconclusive debate between proponents of inclusive fitness and proponents of group selection. It also offers a distinct alternative to the identity politics that currently pervade literary and cultural study.

Evolutionary Review, 2011

Review of three books: Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire, and Coc... more Review of three books: Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire, and Cochran's and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion.

Aisthesis 6:2 (2013): 81-93

I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrot... more I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrote a response. The editor invited me to write a rejoinder to Davies's response. I did, but when Davies declined to answer my rejoinder, the editor declined to publish my rejoinder. Evidently, the editor wished Davies to have the last word. I am here attaching my original critique, Davies's response, and my rejoinder to Davies's response.

SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these wr... more SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular success with an evolutionary book in the humanities. The Gottschall and Wilson collection The Literary Animal (2005) was a success with critics outside the postmodern establishment—in scientific journals and the lay press—but was not a blockbuster at the box office.

Yu Shiyi teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University in... more Yu Shiyi teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University in Beijing. This interview was conducted in September 2015. It was translated into Chinese and published in China Reading Weekly in late 2j015.

Comments on paradigm-level changes in literary study

David Sloan Wilson interviewed me for a feature in the online magazine This View of Life. Two mai... more David Sloan Wilson interviewed me for a feature in the online magazine This View of Life. Two main subjects of the interview are the new journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture and the edited essay collection Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences. I also discuss the history of evolutionary literary study, the obsolescence of narrow-school evolutionary psychology, the centrality of gene-culture coevolution to human evolution, and the backlash against Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance.

A powerpoint presentation for an ongoing project. This version was designed to introduce literary... more A powerpoint presentation for an ongoing project. This version was designed to introduce literary Darwinism to a Chinese audience.

During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolution... more During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material. Those courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate seminar in literary theory that I have taught fourteen times; and (2) eleven interdisciplinary seminars, eight for undergraduates, and three for graduate students. In this article, I describe all these courses and explain how the graduate seminar in literary theory has changed over time, as both evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism have become more mature and sophisticated. Being committed to a biocultural perspective, I discuss the problem of advocacy, how to make sure that students understand that they are free to think out their own positions. I give examples of paper topics, describe the way students respond to evolutionary ideas, and sketch out an ideal curriculum centered on evolutionary theory as a comprehensive explanatory framework within which to synthesize research in the social sciences and the humanities.

This course is cross-listed as a seminar in an Honors College and a literary theory course for En... more This course is cross-listed as a seminar in an Honors College and a literary theory course for English majors. The course is built around topics derived from human life history theory: survival, growing up, mating, family life, life in a social group, encountering aliens and enemies, and the life of the mind. Class meets once a week. In each class session, students read some theoretical essays on the topic, and some literary examples in which the topic is salient. The backbone of the theoretical offerings are chapters in David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th edition). The textbook chapters are supplemented by articles written by evolutionary social scientists and evolutionary literary scholars. The literary texts include poems, short stories, short novels, a play (Hamlet), and graphic novels and stories. Students are given quizzes as reading checks for each week's reading. They write two short papers and one longer paper.

Intensive summer course, July, 2016, Aarhus University. Course Description: Over the past fo... more Intensive summer course, July, 2016, Aarhus University.

Course Description:

Over the past forty years, the evolutionary perspective has gradually developed into an explanatory framework that encompasses all things human: anatomy, physiology, behavior, and the products of the human mind. The evolutionary human sciences are now entering a mature phase. They have developed a sophisticated understanding of basic human motives and the logic of the human life cycle. The one most important weakness in much evolutionary psychology, until recently, has been an inadequate understanding of “culture,” and especially of “imaginative culture”: religion, ideology, myth, the arts, and intellectual life. That weakness is now being corrected by evolutionary thinking emerging from the humanities. Evolutionary studies of literary works have been entering a phase of mature command. This course is designed to acquaint students with the total set of ideas that enter into a biocultural understanding of prose fiction, graphic narratives, and film.

The premise of this course is that works of fiction center on the main substantive areas of human motives: survival, mating, parenting and family life, growing up, establishing an individual identity, engaging in the social life of a community, experiencing conflicts between communities, and pursuing the life of the mind. In each session of the course, we shall read background psychological studies on each of these themes and also read fictional works that center on the theme for that session.

A powerpoint presentation on categories used for organizing works of literature; example of using... more A powerpoint presentation on categories used for organizing works of literature; example of using life history categories to cut themes at their joints.

This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGIN... more This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal is designed to make use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the humanities. These fields now have before them the prospect of a synthesis that would produce, for the first time, a comprehensive and scientifically robust understanding of the human condition. ESIC is founded on the assumption that imaginative culture is an essential part of the human condition. Evolutionary cultural study is still establishing itself as a distinct field. ESIC will provide a nexus for research in that field—to help scholars stay informed about the newest thinking in evolutionary cultural theory, to illuminate connections between findings in seemingly disparate disciplines, to help establish a body of common knowledge, and to set standards for informed and theoretically competent commentary. Already, evolutionary scholars and scientists who focus on humanistic subjects have produced a substantial body of work, much of it good, some of it excellent. That kind of work points a way toward the future. This journal is meant to be an avenue into that future.