Original Article Literature and Science: Doomed Reductionism or Evolutionary Literary

In Interference Patterns Jon Adams seeks to evaluate the past and prospect of attempts within literary studies to imitate or incorporate elements of science. He looks at earlier attempts to relate literary analysis to science, especially in Roman Jakobson’s linguistics (1920s-1980s, e.g. 1980, 1985) and in Northrop Frye’s metacriticism (1957), but has been moved especially by the emergence of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s. He focuses particular attention on E.O. Wilson’s claims for the unity of the natural and social sciences and the humanities and arts (1998) and on Joseph Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory (1995)