Evolution and Literary TheoryCarroll anatomizes the irrationalism of current literary theory with surgical precision. In a concise, lucid prose, he lays bare the sophistries at the heart of the doctrines propounded by Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, J. Hillis Miller, Fish, and many others. In opposition to the textualism and indeterminacy that constitute the central doctrines of poststructuralism, Carroll affiliates himself with a realist and naturalist tradition of thought that runs from Darwin and Huxley, through Leslie Stephen and Thorstein Veblen, to Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper. He offers a comprehensive synthesis of current evolutionary theory in the human sciences, and he shows why the evolutionary paradigm provides the only adequate source for a modern theory of culture. |
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... objective understanding of literature . Abrams argues that aesthetic theories concern themselves with “ facts ” but that “ these facts turn out to have the curious and scientifically reprehensible property of being conspicuously altered ...
... objective orientation by the desire for a correspondence between that structure and reality . The objective orientation tends to concentrate on depicting the personal experience of other human beings , and the subjective on constructing ...
... objective as I have described it thus far is temporally static ; it merely characterizes a constant relation between the organism and its environment . If we situ- ate this dichotomy in time , the two functions associate themselves ...