Teaching Literary Darwinism

During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material. Those courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate seminar in literary theory that I have taught fourteen times; and (2) eleven interdisciplinary seminars, eight for undergraduates, and three for graduate students. In this article, I describe all these courses and explain how the graduate seminar in literary theory has changed over time, as both evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism have become more mature and sophisticated. Being committed to a biocultural perspective, I discuss the problem of advocacy, how to make sure that students understand that they are free to think out their own positions. I give examples of paper topics, describe the way students respond to evolutionary ideas, and sketch out an ideal curriculum centered on evolutionary theory as a comprehensive explanatory framework within which to synthesize research in the social sciences and the humanities.