LIT CRIT

MARXIST, RADICAL feminist, Foucauldian, deconstructionist, post-colonial and queer. It reads like the fight card for an ideological battle royal. In fact, these are some of the major schools of thought in literary criticism from the past 40 years - and they have much in common.
Central to these and all other approaches to understanding literature that are influenced by post-structuralism is the idea that there is no innate human nature. Nature is nurture or, put another way, our nature is to spoon up whatever culture happens to feed us - and we are what we eat.
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary biologists have irreparably shattered the blank slate, most students of the humanities still insist that humans are born all but free of any innate qualities.
My fellow literary Darwinists and I hope to change their minds. By applying evolution-based thinking to fiction, we believe we can invigorate the study of literature, while at the same time mining an untapped source of information for the scientific study of human nature (see "Truth in fiction"). Darwinian thinking can help us better understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with stories.