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It's a little difficult for anyone who wasn't there @ dinner to get a purchase on--much less make a contribution to--this conversation, but there's something that intrigues here, so I'm inviting myself to the party (deliberate feminist re-staging).

As I sit here overhearing Davey channel Deleuze, and Paul channel Darwin, I 'm also hearing quite a bit of back noise: reverberations of the current eddy, in literary circles, known as "biopoetics." I've been exploring, lately, at another table, the possibility that I might have something to contribute to ongoing conversations about the evolution of literature, and have, in preparation, been reviewing material that looks at the intersection of literature and science. There is a group, commonly known as the "literary Darwinists," who have been vigorously trying to correct the poststructuralist theories that subordinate scientific knowledge to "discourse." One of those is a former professor of mine @ Penn (now @ Temple), Bob Storey, whose Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation ends with the plainspoken instruction to "Close your Deleuze; open your Darwin."

Which is to say that the conversation between Paul and Davey intrigues me largely because it lacks the antagonistic quality of this current standoff between the poststructuralists and the literary Darwinists; what I hear, listening in on this conversation, is not the instruction to shut one text in order to open another, but rather a willingness to read outside one's discipline: less an attempt to correct and one-up one another, than a kind of thinking-along-with.

In that spirit, here's a question for Davey, who counters Paul's insistence that the significance of history should be "judged by its generativity, its usefulness in creating new ways to think about things," with the assertion that "science's encounter with history is an encounter only to forget this history...to move past it...a violent refusal...denying so many possible directions." What I hear, here, is an insistence on keeping all stories in play, perpetually (because we can never know, ahead of time, but only retrospectively, WHAT will be generative? is that right?). Is that really what you are saying? ALL stories? Is there no means of adjudication, of pruning the garden?