Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature

An Evolutionary, Cognitivist Approach

M. Drout

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137324603
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

This book introduces lexomics, the use of computer-aided statistical analysis of vocabulary, to measure influence and integrate research from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology with traditional, philological approaches to literature. Connecting the theory of tradition with the phenomenon of influence, Drout moves beyond current theories.

N O T E S

Introduction

1. Michael D. C. Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 261 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006).

2. That culture can be broken down to memes and that memes even exist in any meaningful sense is the subject of much debate, which I discussed in How Tradition Works. For rebuttals to the most frequently raised objections to the meme-based approach, see Drout, How Tradition Works, Chapter 2, “Why Memes?” 45–60.

3. For memetic hygiene, particularly in the context of the English Benedictine Reform, see Drout, How Tradition Works, Chapter 4, “The Rule of St. Benedict, the Regularis Concordia, and the Memetic Basis of the Reform,” 75–124.

4. The copying of a text in a particular period can be as significant—although in different ways—as the composition of a text in that period.

5. Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 382–83.

6. Because I have already laid the historical foundations.

7. Henry C. Plotkin, “People Do More Than Imitate,” Scientific American 283 (2000): 72.

8. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 4–5. The archive is the great mass of texts produced at any one time; the canon is the incredibly reduced subset of texts that we study years later. As Moretti shows with his analysis of Victorian detective fiction, there are many failed experiments, many false starts in the archive. The canon gives us only Sherlock Holmes. If we do not have the archive, Conan Doyle’s stories appear to be much greater saltations than they actually are. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27.

9. Mendel was fortunate that the particular characteristics he chose to examine were controlled by genes on different chromosomes so that crossing-over phenomena did not overly complicate his results.

10. The discovery of the structure of DNA may have forced evolutionary thinking too far toward particulate inheritance and kept the idea of genes as being entirely discrete units, like pearls on a string, viable longer than it needed to be. See below for additional discussion.

11. The intense focus of Derrida and the deconstructionists on binary oppositions is at its heart, I believe, a sincere but misguided search for an atomic unit of culture. The binary opposition of the self/other dichotomy is as good a fundamental unit as any, but in the end is as removed from the important problem of understanding culture as the molar mass of adenine is to the formation of the feathers in a bird.

12. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 227–36.

13. Authorship determines not only how works are classified and interpreted but also who gets legal power over and financial compensation from them.

1 A Theory of Influence

1. I will not here recapitulate every argument made in How Tradition Works but will instead draw from the conclusions reached in that book to further expand the argument. Readers will find answers to many objections to the meme-based approach answered in Chapters 1 and 2. Michael D. C. Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006), 261.

2. Noam Chomsky’s theories of transformational generative grammar have undergone multiple revisions as various scholars, and Chomsky himself, have corrected flaws and modified the theory to account for special cases and previously unforeseen problems.

3. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, one of the most controversial books in biology for nearly two decades, was so clearly written and widely accessible that the concept of “meme” spread widely, though unevenly, through various intellectual communities. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett incorporated Dawkins’ term into his theory of consciousness, giving new prominence to the idea of replicating bits of culture that could be analyzed in Darwinian terms. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Sometime around the year 2000, the word meme made the jump into popular culture, and since 2005 it has been widespread on the Internet and elsewhere as a description for tiny bits of culture that spread widely: chain letters, tag phrases, snippets of video, “phishing” scams, and games on social networks. The website http://memebase.com gathers together a group of idiotic but often hilarious running jokes that are based on these replicating (and varying) snippets of culture.

4. There were good reasons why the Linguistic Society of Paris ruled in 1866 that speculation about the origins of language was ruled out of bounds. Historically, the topic has not led to particularly useful or enlightening discussions, though that may finally be changing with data from the proto-languages of primates and from artificial intelligence research. See Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

5. I would like to thank Harold Morowitz for some guidance on this topic.

6. When literary critics describe one phenomenon or another with the now-cliché “always already,” they are engaging, from a slightly different direction, the same problem.

7. Although the recognition that all interesting memes are meme-plexes is useful, it does not eliminate the underlying problem of identifying the bound...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• One   A Theory of Influence
• Two   Influence and Its Detection with Lexomic Analysis
• Three   Cultural Selection Pressure: Mnemonic and Cognitive Aesthetics
• Four   Adaptive Landscapes, Cognitive Prototypes, and Genre
• Five   Application of the Theory: Genre and Adaptive Radiation in Poems of the Exeter Book
• Six   Authorship, Authors, and The Anxiety of Influence
• Conclusion   This View of Culture
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index