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By Jonathan Gottschall

Literary experiences are at a tipping element. ." there's vast contract that the self-discipline is in "crisis"--that it is aimless, that its highbrow strength is spent, that each one of the tendencies are undesirable, and that basic swap might be required to set issues right. But there's little contract on what these alterations may be, and nobody can expect which method issues will finally tip.  

Literature, technological know-how, and a brand new Humanities represents a daring new reaction to the obstacle in educational literary experiences. This booklet provides a complete problem to dominant paradigms of literary research and provides a sweeping critique of these paradigms, and sketches outlines of a brand new paradigm encouraged via medical theories, equipment, and attitudes. 

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1992). Humans act and think as they do, not because these patterns of thought and action enhance survival and reproduction in novel modern environments (though they often may) but because they enhanced survival and reproduction in the band and tribal communities of our ancestors. Just as our greed for sweet, salty, and fatty foods is no longer adaptive in food-rich modern environments, so too may psychological and behavioral tendencies that promoted the fitness of our ancestors actually reduce the fitness of us, their modern descendants.

Rather, it is based on scientific information about how genes interact with environments: genes have a strong influence on behavior, yes, but behavior and environment also exert strong influence over genes (a classic example of the latter fact is adult lactose tolerance in populations with a history of herding dairy animals, and lactose intolerance in populations lacking this cultural practice; see Richardson and Boyd 2005 for more examples). As Matt Ridley writes in Nature Via Nurture, “The more we lift the lid on the genome, the more vulnerable to experience genes appear to be .

In short, the theories of human nature that have dominated the recent history of literary theory and criticism now exist almost exclusively in the humanities. While literary scholars are often dismissive of concepts like “right” and “wrong,” “true” and “false,” most of our theories ON THEORY 19 have been thoroughly discredited. * Most will feel that Joseph Carroll goes too far in concluding that literary scholars’ dependency on deficient theories of human nature means that, A very large proportion of the work in critical theory that has been done in the past twenty years will prove to be not merely obsolete but essentially void.

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