I like to talk about evolution and English departments, and with this article in The Chronicle Review, I get to talk about both at the same time.  It’s about what’s called “Literary Darwinism,” which (some think) is the last best hope for literary studies to make itself relevant and rigorous and vigorous again in higher education.  The work of the Literary Darwinists “[...] emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts - the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals - and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.”  Now something I like about Literary Darwinism is that it has no love for the glut of 20th century theory that still plagues English departments:

Literary Darwinism conceives of itself as the primary opposition to cultural theory in all its forms: Marxism, poststructuralism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth. In the Literary Darwinist mind-set, cultural theory - subjective, deliberately obtuse, politicized, based on outmoded assumptions - is the disease that’s stricken the academy, and scientific rigor is the cure. “Most of the big ideas in literary theory have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no life in psychology anymore - it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no life really in political theory or in economics classrooms,” [one Literary Darwinist] says. “My point is, we start with these bad theories, and work founded on faulty premises is going to be faulty itself.”

My favorite part of the article comes near the end, when one professor says he doesn’t like Literary Darwinism.  In fact, he “sees Literary Darwinism as a force that could add to the joblessness and hopelessness of students and professors, instead of vice versa.”

“Say I am a professor of English, I have graduate students, and I tell them: You have to forget about everything that your colleagues have been working on for the last 30 years because it’s all literary theory, it’s all wrong, and now you have this new scientific approach that you use. Now let me ask you, what would happen if a graduate student who hears this goes on the job market?”

That’s right.  We can’t change the English paradigm because it would hurt our current graduate students’ feelings too much.  Unfortunately, Literary Darwinism is not going to save English departments.  English departments will only be saved by a collective rebirth as rhetoric departments, or something like them, where two big things need to happen: 1) the teaching of rhetoric, the teaching of various modes of oral and written communication, a renewed emphasis on debate and classic and contemporary ideas about rhetoric and argument, the reclaiming of speech and public speaking as a branch of rhetoric/English, which would increase the relevance of English departments around the country as places where one learns to read and write and speak and think; and 2) the healthy downsizing of literary history, criticism, and theory to a subdivision of the new emphasis on ideas, debate, rhetoric, and prose composition.  But I presume too much and am too ignorant and unqualified to say such things.