One of my colleagues and I were talking about teaching theory. When I teach our theory course, I start with Marx, then do some Freud (and Lacan, a little), then turn to feminism (starting with Virginia Woolf, and including Gayle Rubin's great essay "The Traffic in Women," which picks up beautifully on Marx and Freud and into Levi-Strauss).
My colleague wondered why we don't teach Darwinian theory, since it's the most well-supported and influential theory around, pretty much.
So I'm trying to think of ways I might find Darwinian theory useful in analyzing or understanding texts. I haven't read much in the way of Darwinian or evolutionary theory since I was an undergrad, and what came to mind first was the really irritating socio-biology I had to read then. The irritating part was the deep sexism. If you've read socio-biology from the 70s and 80s, you know what I mean: the arguments that male humans were innately more sexually active than female humans, and more sexually desiring. This irritated me as an undergrad, even, but our sexual jokes tend to focus on male desire and female lack of desire, right?
But when I was in the Peace Corps, I lived in an area where three indigenous cultures came together. One of these cultures deeply believed that women were so sexually active and predatory that men were pretty much endangered any time they were alone with a woman. The solution in this culture was (of course) that women pretty much took a kid or another woman as a chaperone any time they wanted to go out. So that made me question the things I'd read and been taught.
When I really got into early modern culture, I learned that a ton of the sexual jokes involve men who are cuckolds; there's even a word for a cuckold who's happy about it, a wittol (usually because he's happy someone else is satisfying his wife). There are also lots of jokes about horny widows. So it looks like early modern culture thought of women as somewhat more sexually active and desiring than men.
So I tend to think that evolutionary theories about human behavior need to be way more culturally aware than they were then. But I don't necessarily think that's an easy direction, given the level of institutionalized sexism (including in the sciences).
Then I started thinking about the ways texts and art work on our brains. In English, for example, short rhymy lines tend to feel funny. But I don't know poetry in every culture; do people have the same reaction across cultures, or is this reaction a matter of cultural training on some level?
Poe thought that certain sounds evoked certain responses. But would that hold across cultures? English doesn't use all the sounds humans can make, and doesn't distinguish between some sounds that other languages do. It's hard for me to think that there's a way to use evolutionary theory to explain poetic responses in anything but uselessly broad strokes.
Is there something innate in the way that humans create narratives? How could we figure that out without some other sort of narrative forms?
And what would that sort of thing tell me about King Lear?
In a way, relativity is more useful in helping me understand how artist in the early 20th century were exploring ways of representing human experience and the problems of objectivity. But I can't imagine being able to use it usefully for Shakespeare or early modern texts, and really, that's the test for me.
I'm obviously missing what might be a fruitful approach, but I'm not seeing it. Help me out?
(nb. For texts and such by authors who were influenced by Darwin or evolutionary theory, bringing evolutionary theory in makes obvious sense, of course, in the same way that understanding medieval Christianity is vital to understanding Chaucer. But when we're really after theory qua theory, we want it to have explanatory power beyond it's direct influence, right?)