Irony abounds in a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Jonathan Gottschall, the pioneering figure of Literary Darwinism, who has taken to MMA fighting since his career as an academic foundered. Gottschall made a splash in literary circles with a dogmatic assertion that the lens of evolutionary biology can and should supercede all other modes of literary analysis; the reaction was polarizing and the fallout, it seems, is ongoing. David Wescott takes a walk around campus with Gottschall, exploring the birth of his theory and how it has pitted him against traditional English Departments across the world.
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