Abstract
This dissertation is predicated on the notion that the concept of the Third Culture describes a dominant intellectual force in contemporary society and that literary and cultural studies thinkers must learn to engage it while maintaining and understanding the rich and varied history of humanistic thought (even its most skeptical kind). The Third Culture describes a move beyond the traditional categories of the “sciences” and the “humanities” to show how they have been transgressed and are being transgressed. Thus, such a new concept needs to address these disciplines that properly reflect how the sciences and humanities intersect. To do so, this dissertation analyzes the Third Culture through several avenues from critical theory to evolutionary biology to contemporary literature and culture. These avenues converge by viewing the sciences and the humanities as compatible domains, even while recognizing their important distinctions. Beginning with a cultural reading of the Wedge strategy, an Intelligent Design agenda aimed at reinserting theism into secular culture via the mechanisms of Postmodernity (media tools of an advanced post-industrial society), this dissertation announces the need for attention paid to finding common ground between humanists and scientists because of the difficulty of finding such ground (we don't read each other carefully enough) and because both are being attacked by the same parties (i.e., from the right by politically motivated theists). It follows by arguing via Michel Foucault and cognitive literary studies that John Brockman’s use of humanism is misguided in his definition of the Third Culture. It then attempts a proper approach to the sciences and the humanities by revising E.O. Wilson’s consilience of reductive unification via Stephen Jay Gould’s consilience of equal regard. It presents Gould’s thought as a corrective, in that he spent a career problematizing key categories within the institution of orthodox evolutionary biology. As an example of how literary studies should not engage the Third Culture, it then critiques Joseph Carroll’s form of Literary Darwinism as faulty for failing to problematize categories such as “Darwinism,” in its political agenda to challenge postmodern cultural theory. As an attempt at praxis reflecting the overall methodology and theory utilized in this dissertation, it provides a literary reading of Ian McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love (1998), that represents the sciences and humanities as fully consistent with this dissertation’s conception of the Third Culture. In the end, it presents the Third Culture as a viable field of investigation for literary and cultural studies thinkers. The final product hopes to be an example of how one might approach the Third Culture: in an irenic spirit that values both domains of the sciences and the humanities.
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