A Reply to My Critics

Abstract

The responses to my essay on literary Darwinism present a welcome opportunity to engage its topic on broader terms. The essay focused on an academically marginal but publicly significant movement in literary studies, one that hopes to ground the study of literature on evolutionary psychology and so, on its view, to put our rickety discipline on the steady foundation of science. My argument against this movement challenged both its account of the science and its treatment of texts. And it did so with an end in view. Literary Darwinism is worth taking seriously for the same reason that it has gathered so much attention in the popular press. It asks us to think hard about our work and to consider any relation we might have to the social and natural sciences. How can we defend the aims and methods of humanities? How might we integrate research from other disciplines into the study of literary artifacts and culture? How finally might we expand our sense of humanistic research for the twenty-first century? These are all important questions to consider, and they extend beyond the local concerns of my initial argument. So while I take some time here to