I had a recent email discussion with a fellow scholar who argued against using evolutionary psychology to understand the actions of Shakespeare's characters on the grounds that Shakespeare couldn't have put in something he didn't know about. The problem with this is that if evolutionary psychology accurately describes human behavior, then Shakespeare doesn't have to have known anything about it to nonetheless use it. I think this may be one of the main errors theorists make in their objection to using things like evolutionary theory and psychology.
Oddly. that never stopped many scholars from using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, though.
5 comments:
New World scholarship's willingness to grovel at the altar of Freud baffles me daily.
I think the main problem is that contemporary critical theory has no sense of depth--its approach to topology is basically two dimensional, like a game of Reversi. Ideas (or ideologies) interact, are constantly "in flux," and "subversion" and "containment" occur, but the idea of "consilience" or "vertical integration" or a "nested hierarchy" among critical explanatory models is either completely overlooked or regarded as totalizing and fascistic.
I've also heard the objection that a Darwinian account of Prince Hamlet's behaviour fails because he rejects Ophelia, and is thus obviously uninterested in offspring. While that particular nay-sayer obviously fails to understand the subtleties of sexual selection and status competition as they play out over time, her point does suggest a further question: if Hamlet is an "adaptation executor" rather than a "fitness maximizer," what adaptations, specifically, is he executing? For an evolutionary psychological reading to be convincing, wouldn't it have to account for his jealousy of Claudius and his rejection of Ophelia in the same basic terms?
For that matter, he might not be 100% sure that Claudius isn't his father, which would cast the problem as a game of incomplete information with payoffs in terms of kin selection, but that still doesn't explain Ophelia. It could be that he finds her untrustworthy, that he smells a rat. But that hardly requires Darwinian elaboration.
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