Taking Darwin Metaphorically and Literally: Genres and Sciences in a Survival Struggle

Abstract

Literary history is idiographic, whereas theory tends to be nomothetic and closer to the sciences, adopting their concepts, methods, and epistemological models. In the study of literary genres, which demands both historical and theoretical perspectives, the idiographic and nomothetic principles coalesce. This is the reason why, in the history of genre studies, one can notice the tendency of emulating the discourse of the natural sciences. A prominent model of scientificity for literary studies was provided by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In the (post)positivist history of literary genres at the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., Brunetière) as well as in Moretti’s materialist-systemic alternative to the postmodernist culturalist mainstream at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Darwin’s concept was adopted analogically, figuring as an epistemic metaphor that aimed to re-conceptualize the research field to achieve nomothetism of the natural sciences. In his efforts to bring literary history closer to the scientific ideal, Brunetière remained at the level of declarations, whereas Moretti succeeded in further developing metaphorical analogy by integrating scientific methods and heuristics into comparative literary (genre) studies. – In present-day social Darwinism, unleashed by the globally dominant neoliberal economics, the old epistemological and cultural distinction between the humanities and hard sciences (cf. Snow’s “two cultures”) is escalating into their survival struggle, which has already been signaled by the “science wars” of the 1990s. In this context, a new trend of literary Darwinism (Boyd, Carroll, Gottschall, etc.) emerged that took Darwinian evolutionism literally, as a platform on which literature (along with genres) is to be explained as a phenomenon resulting from some remote evolutional adaptation of the humans. Literary Darwinism preaches that literary studies can be saved from its relativism, the constructivist impasse, and social irrelevance if it accepts a realist epistemology and becomes “consilient” with the general system of natural sciences. However, the Neo-Darwinists among literary scholars in fact practice traditional literary interpretation, seeking allegories of biologically conceived “human nature” in literary texts.