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This paper will use several notions of Charles Peirce – his Categories and semiotics – and interweave evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and literary studies in order to connect the disciplines such that the natural sciences may be used as interpretive tools in literary exegesis. Despite the ostensible differences between literary texts and the endeavors of the natural sciences, Peirce’s ideas can put them into conversation. Current evolutionary literary theories like Literary Darwinism require a more solid footing and methodology from which to ground their hypotheses, and this paper will use a philosophical frame to connect the pieces. Peirce and those following his ideas provide the inroads for such a mixed methodology, which will undergird current evolutionary aesthetic practice without needlessly replacing other literary theories. This article will outline Peirce’s schema and a modern reconfiguration thereof, and then will posit that literature (here focusing on a short story) functions as a tension between the iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes of representation. Peirce’s Categories permit reality into the language/text/literature debate, and his notion of the Index can be used as reference to evolved traits in  homo sapiens  in literary representation. Peirce gives organization, coherence, and cohesion without limiting the interpretational possibility of a literary work.

Peirce, evolutionary aesthetics, and literary meaning: Tension, index, symbol