The Review: Evolutionary Psychology vs. Literature, 'Macbeth'!, What We're Reading

A book review with the knives out. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Connoisseurs of the hatchet job won’t want to miss Timothy Snyder’s New York Times [pan]( of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. As Snyder sees it, Gottschall — an evangelist of evolutionary-psychological approaches to literary theory — suffers from delusions of grandeur: “Gottschall tells ... a story about himself: a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics.” In fact, Snyder says, Gottschall’s putatively pathbreaking Darwinian analysis is a sloppy mash-up of (unacknowledged) structuralist narratology, poorly understood data, misconstrued history, and crude psychology. “This book,” Snyder concludes, “is just sad.” Back in 2015, our David Wescott [profiled]( Gottschall, who had recently published a book about the evolutionary significance of cage-fighting, or mixed martial arts. Spectacles of ritualized violence, Gottschall [says]( “serve a vital function: they help men work out conflicts and thrash out hierarchies while minimizing carnage and social chaos.” Gottschall, peculiarly, hitches his perfectly legitimate interest in the anthropology of violence to his longstanding beef with his home discipline, literary study, which has become, he explains, “feminized in spirit,” devoted to extirpating male undergraduates’ “masculine core": “It’s probably not far wrong to say that masculinity is the real villain in the average literary-theory course — the great root of all the other evils.” (Does it follow that a program of literary study devoted to evolutionary psychology would be “masculinized in spirit”?) This Oedipal agon with the bad castrating parent of institutionalized literary study goes back to the beginning of Gottschall’s career. His 2008 monograph, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, insists that the literary humanities are “floundering, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant” because they have failed to absorb the insights of “evolutionary models of behavior and psychology.” In a 2011 article in Critical Inquiry called “Against Literary Darwinism,” Jonathan Kramnick both sketches the intellectual history behind Gottschall & Co.'s application of such models to the understanding of literature and rejects the “ersatz anthropology of Pleistocene-era hominids” he says they rely on. Read Wescott’s profile of Gottschall [here]( Snyder’s review of The Story Paradox [here]( Kramnick’s critique of literary Darwinism [here]( and responses to Kramnick by Paul Bloom, Joseph Carroll, and others [here](. SPONSOR CONTENT | Kelly Education [Learn how colleges are attracting, hiring and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce.]( Macbeth I saw the the Joel Coen Macbeth, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, just after the New Year — the first movie I’ve seen in a theater since Covid hit. It’s tremendous, and it put me in the mood to read some Shakespeare criticism. So I asked my friend Matt Hunter, a Shakespeare scholar at Texas Tech, to recommend scholarly essays on Macbeth. He sent along a few of his favorites: Harry Berger Jr.'s “[The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation]( Janet Adelman’s “[Escaping the Matrix: The Structure of Masculinity in Macbeth]( Coriolanus]( and Donald Foster’s “[Macbeth’s]( on Time]( Time’s war on me means I’ve only read, so far, the Berger, which argues against “restorationist” readings of the play — readings that assume Macbeth’s downfall and Malcolm’s ascension predict a harmonious future for Scotland. On the contrary, Berger argues, Macbeth’s argument is that “the killing of the king may be a recurrent feature of the political process by which the kingdom periodically rids itself of the poison accumulating within it as a result of normal institutional functions.” This dark reading of a dark play would seem, too, to be Coen’s; Malcolm’s victory at the film’s end is curdled and ironic. What We’re Reading To ring in the new year, I asked my colleagues across The Chronicle for book recommendations — what’s the best book they read during 2021? Here’s what they told me. ... Kate Hidalgo Bellows: “The best book I read this year was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The book pays special attention to the controversial Belfast Project at Boston College, the subpoena of which raised questions about academic freedom and ethics.” Andrew Mytelka: “A saving grace of the pandemic is the time it has carved out for reading, enabling me to finally tackle War and Peace, an absorbing tale worth every moment, even the parts when Tolstoy plays historian.” Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez: "The Twilight Zone, by Nona Fernández. It’s about a member of the secret police who confesses his crimes in the middle of Chile’s Pinochet regime. The narrator, a woman who first spots this man as a child, really makes this story. It’s a novel about historical erasure and the specific little moments, like waiting for the bus, people watching in the afternoon, that make up our lives.” Beth McMurtrie: “I reread Gulliver’s Travels last year and boy, did it resonate. Swift’s characters are absurd, bigoted, self-important, paranoid, and barbaric. They’re also consumed by trivial matters and bureaucracy. (I particularly liked the section on the pursuit of ridiculous experiments by people with little understanding of science or math, like trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.)” David Wescott: “I found Timothy Brennan’s Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said engrossing. It paints a rich picture of Said in the mid-70s clacking away on his typewriter, feuding with rivals, and zealously guarding his espresso machine.” Jess Engebretson: "Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing got me to delete email from my phone (really!) and spend more time walking around my city. Her surprising, sideways connections — from crows to maps to Melville — are a delight to follow.” Sara Lipka: “I alternately read and listened to The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s epic chronicle of the Great Migration (dazzlingly narrated by Robin Miles), and, beyond the cruel details and individual fortitude, what stirred me was the blend of journalism and scholarship — more than 1,200 interviews! — that gave voice to history.” What about you? What book made a big impression on you in 2021? Drop me a line and I’ll mention it in the next newsletter — I ‘m at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Recruiting and Retaining Students in a Challenging Market]( [Recruiting and Retaining Students in a Challenging Market]( If Americans were already skeptical that higher education is worth the expense, the financial toll of Covid-19 has made college an even harder sell. For institutions to thrive, leaders must figure out ways to attract new students and keep the ones they have enrolled. [Visit the store to order your copy.]( The Latest THE REVIEW | FORUM [The Best Scholarly Books of 2021]( [STORY IMAGE]( Thinkers including K. Anthony Appiah, Priya Satia, and Greil Marcus pick their favorites. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW [What’s a ‘Woke Racist’?]( By Eduardo Peñalver [STORY IMAGE]( John McWhorter’s latest book relies on hollow caricatures of antiracist thinking. THE REVIEW [When Administrators Make Mistakes]( By Kimberly A. Yuracko [STORY IMAGE]( They are being pushed to deny complexity, ignore ambiguity, and denigrate opposing viewpoints. Recommended - “But nothing — and I mean nothing — compared to seeing the entire Arkestra on stage: packed together, swelling sometimes to twenty or twenty-five musicians, Tate facing his crew like Dr. Funkenstein, hands flailing as he draws out mind-blowing sounds. You wouldn’t dare blink.” [That’s Robin D.G. Kelley]( on the late musician and critic Greg Tate, at Boston Review. Following Kelley’s intro, he and the South African writer Bongani Madondo talk about Tate. - “It’s hard not to worry that officials may be denigrating rapid tests now for the same reason they denigrated the use of masks early in the pandemic — we don’t have enough of them.” In The New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci [questions]( the assertions of the CDC and the Biden administration. - “As a replacement for religion, humanism has not fulfilled the hopes that people had for it, and neither has secularism in any of its other manifestations. They never can, and they never will.” At Salmagundi, William Deresiewicz [responds]( to Ross Douthat on some big questions. - “It is asking much of art — perhaps too much — to expect it to fulfill all the spiritual exigencies that religion used to address.” At the Best American Poetry blog, [David Lehman on abstract expressionism]( as “a particularly effective religion-substitute.” (Text from 1995.) - “Didion’s target was the ‘psychic hardpan.’ This she located just beneath the seemingly rational or ideological topsoil, which she found to be ‘dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies.’” That’s [Zadie Smith on the late Joan Didion,]( in The New Yorker. SPONSOR CONTENT | SALESFORCE.ORG [How higher education is adopting new strategies in loyalty management]( Enabling institutions to drive lifelong engagement with alumni, learn how loyalty management solutions are fostering opportunities for alumni to pursue their passions at their alma mater. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Missing Men on Campus]( [The Missing Men on Campus]( The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond. Explore how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there. [Order your copy today.]( JOB OPPORTUNITIES Apply for the top jobs in higher education and [search all our open positions](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( | [It was ok]( | [Loved it]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. 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