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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... society , as that society is represented in the novels . It would be possible to construct an interpretive argument in which Austen's representation of society is taken as a tacitly ironic foil for the actual society in which she lives ...
... society is the larger category ; individuals , the sexes , and families are the components of society , but society does not have a primary causal or regulative status in relation to sex dif- ferences and family functions . In ...
... society , and taking rape and armed robbery as illustrative instances of delinquent behavior , we can identify a complex of nine propositions , each one either truistic , tautologous , or fallacious , that are implied in Foucault's ...