Back to where we came from: evolutionary psychology and children’s literature and media

In 2010, The New York Times ran an article which announced that ‘the next big thing in English [Studies]’ was ‘using evolutionary theory to explain fiction’. This announcement may be considered somewhat belated, given that the interest in the potential relevance of evolutionary psychology to literary studies might be traced back to a considerably earlier date than 2010. Joseph Carroll first published on the subject as far back as 1995, and by 2002 Steven Pinker could claim that ‘within the academy, a growing number of mavericks are looking to Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to re-establish human nature as the center of any understanding of the arts’. Nevertheless, The New York Times’s announcement may be taken as a measure of an increasingly visible trend in both popular and academic thinking. We argue in this chapter that this trend is motivated specifically by nostalgia, or the longing for a past which seems forever lost. A second aspect of this nostalgia will also be discussed to do with the way that we argue that this supposedly ‘new’ area of research repeats exactly a long history of prior claims of many eminent children’s literature critics with respect to ideas of childhood, language and children’s literature and media. Despite the repeated, insistent claims of several of the Literary Darwinists, including, for instance, Joseph Carroll, one of the founders of this way of thinking, that they are working in heroic opposition to a dominant, obscurantist and anti-science ‘literary theory’, we argue here that in fact there is a high degree of convergence between the claims made about childhood, language and children’s literature in Literary Darwinism and much children’s literature criticism. We therefore see Literary Darwinism and (children’s) literature studies as not being in any sense about an opposition or separation between science and literary or humanist studies, but about a convergence underpinned and driven by the same nostalgia for a singular, stable, uniform and universal past, leading to a singular, stable, uniform and universal present. Finally, we suggest that it is not just in these two fields in which this nostalgia operates, but that this can currently be seen in sub-streams within many disciplines – in both in arts, sciences and humanities -- as a founding, powerfully political, driver

Reproductive technologies: the owned child and commodification

This article analyses some complexities in and around the idea that the child, in several recent discussions on reproductive technologies, is constantly brought in relation to the market and commodity, and yet is not simply equated with commodity. When and how is the child a commodity and not a commodity

The object of neuroscience and literary studies

An investment in the object as unquestionably self-evident and self-defining has for quite some time now been widely critiqued as a central philosophical tenet of crony capitalism in its current economic, material, social, cultural and institutional manifestations. In this article, I trace that appeal to the category of the object in order to claim its discursive presence also in recent critical tendencies in literary criticism in relation to science, specifically evolutionary psychology and its underpinning neuro- and cognitive science. I focus my explorations through the 2010–2012 debate about ‘Literary Darwinism’ in the American journal Critical Inquiry and some selected articles from a 2008 special double-issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’, arguing that both illustrate typical, core issues and problems in the critical discourses about science and literature, specifically how both the literary criticism and the science that is drawn on to support it are nevertheless all made to be rooted in a world of an agreed liberal, political and ideological commitment to a subject assumed as an autonomous agent with a transparent consciousness and language to match

Children’s literature, cognitivism and neuroscience

In much of the world, including Britain, the so-called ‘neuro-turn’ has in recent decades become a predominant narrative accounting for human emotions, cognition and behaviours. The beginning of such an interest can – and has – been located at many different points, ranging from nineteenth-century ideas of heredity and phrenology, to Charles Darwin’s writings in and of themselves, to developments in evolutionary psychology of which British geneticists Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose wrote in 2001 that they had “grown dramatically” “[o]ver the last ten years,” (1) to American cultural and literary critic Jonathan Kramnick’s observation that the “[a]cademic year 2008–2009 was something of a watershed moment for literary Darwinism” (315) due to the twin publication of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution and Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. In this chapter I explore ways of accounting for the power of the neuro-turn narratives in contemporary Britain through drawing parallels between this widespread interest in cognitivist and neuroscientific approaches in evolutionary psychology and certain investments in childhood. My interest lies primarily not just in analysing the problematic nature of the science that this kind of work claims, but in analysing what is at stake in such approaches. Specifically, I too am puzzled by the popularity of these kinds of claims when both the scientific and the philosophical frameworks they rest on are, at best, questionable and also not in any sense new or original, neither philosophically nor scientifically speaking. I argue here, following theorist Neil Cocks’s formulation, that neuroscientific accounts of cognition recover and maintain thought as scan, brain and figure: an object of scrutiny and exchange. Therefore, these cognitivist and neuroscientific studies are about, as theorist Jacqueline Rose puts it in relation to childhood and children’s literature specifically, “a conception of both the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way, a conception which places the innocence of the child and a primary state of language and/ or culture in a close and mutually dependent relationship” (9). This chapter demonstrates, then, further implications of reading the child as textuality rather than constituting it as a ‘merely’ textual reflection or representation of a prior and primary sociological or anthropological entity. In these terms, my reading engages with how the child – as with the neuro-turn – is an instance of the capitalist insistence as it operates in Britain today on the object as object, even while the child also is made to police a capitalist market-place which is defined by the child’s placement as outside that market. Both in discussing the child as a produced object (and any object as produced) and in reading the child as text, the same drive is here for me at work, in, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, questioning “the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form; the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself” (2008, 3; emphasis in original). My interest then is not to ask, what is a child, but why and how the question ‘what is the child?’ persists. As part of this question, finally, I explain in this chapter also how and why children’s literature criticism must by definition continue either (advertently or inadvertently) to ignore or misread Jacqueline Rose’s famous arguments in her book The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, just as neuroscientific accounts of cognition, whether or not in relation to literature specifically, must ignore or suppress the arguments of previous theorists of science (especially, although not only, feminist theorists of science) such as Donna Haraway

The case of 'The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction': deconstruction, psychoanalysis, childhood, animality

This article argues a different understanding to that in children’s literature studies more widely of the implications of the work of Jacqueline Rose in 'The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction' (1984) for thinking about childhood, animality and children’s literature and links these implications to the similar implications of Jacques Derrida’s thinking about the child and animality. In both cases, the child and the animal are seen not as psycho-biological entities nor as products of social constructivism nor as categories that must be seen as inclusive of variety, but as memories, where memory is understood in the psychoanalytic sense as a present production of a past, including ‘observation’ as remembered. The implications of the arguments are demonstrated in relation to readings of Jessica Love’s award-winning picture book 'Julián is a Mermaid' (2018) as well as several reviews of the text in relation specifically to ideas of (trans) sexuality, gender, childhood, ethnicity and mermaids. Key here is what is understood to be the shared interest of psychoanalysis and deconstructive thinking in not stabilising definitions but instead in reading them as shifting in perspective

Motherhood, evolutionary psychology and mirror neurons or: ‘Grammar is politics by other means’

Through a close analysis of socio-biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on motherhood and ‘mirror neurons’ it is argued that Hrdy’s claims exemplify how research that ostensibly bases itself on neuroscience, including in literary studies ‘literary Darwinism’, relies after all not on scientific, but on political assumptions, namely on underlying, unquestioned claims about the autonomous, transparent, liberal agent of consumer capitalism. These underpinning assumptions, it is further argued, involve the suppression or overlooking of an alternative, prior tradition of feminist theory, including feminist science criticism

Revisiting "The 'Philosophical Investigations’ children"

In my 2003 article “The Philosophical Investigations’ children” I offered a non-essentialist reading of the child in Wittgenstein’s work, arguing that such a reading challenged previous interpretations of the text by analysing an a priori reliance on a “real child” as part of a reliance on a “real world” somehow outside of textuality. I further argued that my anti-essentialist reading of the child is authorised by the Philosophical Investigations’ own arguments and positions and that interpretations of this text that maintain an investment in a materialist “real” (including the child as real or actual) fail fully to understand the nature of Wittgenstein’s interest in and definition of “language games” and an attendant engagement with issues of perspectives and their implications. In this article, I follow up on the current status of readings of the child in relation to Philosophical Investigations and the wider implications of those readings, including for ideas of the “pedagogy” of Philosophical Investigations itself, including demonstrating how both subsequent essentialist and non-essentialist readings of Philosophical Investigations continue to overlook implications of non-essentialist thinking about childhood

Principles and practice in critical theory : children's literature.

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Safety of Vitrectomy for Floaters

PurposeTo assess the risks of vitrectomy for the removal of primary and secondary vitreous opacities.DesignRetrospective, nonrandomized, interventional case series.MethodsWe reviewed the results of 116 consecutive cases of vitrectomy for vitreous floaters. Eighty-six cases were primary and 30 cases were secondary floaters. Main outcome measures were the incidence of iatrogenic retinal breaks and postoperative rhegmatogenous retinal detachments.ResultsWe found iatrogenic retinal breaks in 16.4% of operations. There was no statistically significant difference in risk between cases of primary and secondary floaters. Intraoperative posterior vitreous detachment induction was found to increase significantly the risk of breaks. Retinal detachment occurred in 3 cases (2.5%), all after operations for primary floaters. One case of complicated retinal detachment ended with a low visual acuity of hand movements. Cataract occurred in 50% of phakic cases. Transient postoperative hypotony was found after 5.2% of our operations, and transient postoperative high intraocular pressure was encountered in 7.8%. An intraoperative choroidal hemorrhage occurred in 1 case, which resolved spontaneously. The mean visual acuity improved from 0.20 to 0.13 logarithm of the minimal angle of resolution units.ConclusionsThe risk profile of vitrectomy for floaters is comparable with that of vitrectomy for other elective indications. Retinal breaks are a common finding during surgery and treatment of these breaks is crucial for the prevention of postoperative retinal detachment. Patients considering surgery for floaters should be informed specifically about the risks involved