Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Special Evolutionary Issue of the online journal Politics and Culture. Edited by Joseph Carroll.

http://politicsandculture.org/2010/04/28/contents-2/

27 essays organized under five headings: (1) The Evolutionary Turn in Psychology and the Humanities; (2) Politics and Ethics; (3) Religion; (4) Literature; and (5) music.

Also, a symposium on the question "How is art biological," with commentaries by seven scholars and with responses from various contributors to each of the commentaries.

In contemporary philosophy and bioethics the human enhancement topic is extremely popular. Some of the analyses and reflections do not leave the specialist circle, which is not a positive phenomenon as the discussion about our common human future should be open also to those who do not have scientific or philosophical background. This lacuna can be filled by literature, which allows to portray some ideas and projects in a more approachable way. The book makes evident that the images of the (post)human and the (post)human society should be subject to a complex analysis because under the surface of the literary images we can trace the presence of a utopian discourse reposing on particular ontological , anthropological, ethical and social presuppositions, worth further evaluation.
Rev. Grzegorz Hołub (The Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow)
The book is situated at the intersection of the literature studies, culture studies, philosophy and sociology. It analyses the titular evantropian-human enhancement-project in a broad range of juvenile fiction, showing how the novels for young audiences are an "in vitro" test for hypothetical and imagined futures. The author argues that this fiction can to a considerable extent shape the common beliefs not only about the future but above all about science, technology, medicine, aesthetics and values, which subsequently influence the readers' perspectives and decisions. The conclusions can be of help for the scholars in literature and culture, but also more broadly: for educators, psychologists or simply parents interested in what contemporary juvenile fiction has to offer to their children. Barbara Klonowska, the the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

Within the past few years, theoretical biology, evolutionary social science, and evolutionary literary study have been correcting basic mistakes, producing new concepts, and reaching a more complete and adequate understanding of human behavior, including cultural and literary behavior. This chapter integrates these new concepts and demonstrates how they can be used to understand specific literary works. Separate sections are devoted to ideas from theoretical biology about the sources of cooperation in all living things, to ideas from the social sciences about human social organization, to ideas from evolutionary aesthetics about the adaptive function of the arts, and to ideas from literary theory about how meaning works in fiction. A section discussing specific literary examples illustrates the way the arts help generate group identity, integrate individuals into groups, and mediate between the needs of individuals and the claims of groups. Seven concepts from the research on evolved human sociality are used to organize the literary examples: dominance, reverse dominance, internalized norms, leadership, strong reciprocity, legal institutions, and legitimacy.

First, this paper will explain why human enhancement has always been part of humanity and why to refuse human enhancement is to negate the human fundamental drive for improvement. Second, we will distinguish between a “natural state” and an “artificial state” before defining humans as artificial agents that desire artificial conditions. As artificial agents, human species tend to depart from the original and primitive natural state to a more advanced artificial or technological state. Third, we will examine the two important arguments against transhumanism and explain why they are inaccurate or mistaken. On the one hand, the believe that enhancement trivializes the human identity and, on the other hand, the argument that considers that human enhancement is “playing God”.

There has been a great deal of uproar about Darwinian approaches in literary scholarship. Statements range from enthusiastic prophecies of a new paradigm for literary studies to acrimonious scoldings of reductionism. Believing that the major challenge is first to find good questions to which evolutionary psychology might provide us with good answers, I outline and critically assess different veins of argumentation as revealed in recent contributions to the field. As an alternative to some simplistic mimeticism in present Literary Darwinism, I put forward the idea of evolutionary psychology as a heuristic theory that serves to resolve defined problems in interpretation and literary theory.

Based on the critical work of Jorge de Sena about the literary creation of Fernando Pessoa, this paper intends to investigate the construction of that which it postulates as the key concept of the senian readings of Pessoa: the notion of evolution, which would have caracterized the variegated procedures of the poet'ʹs writings. This stage of the study focuses on Jorge de Sena´s readings in the 1940s.

Literary Darwinism is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that seeks to explain literature and its oral antecedents (“literary behaviors“), from a Darwinian perspective. Considered the fact that an evolutionary approach to human behavior has proven insightful, this is a promising endeavor. However, Literary Darwinism as it is commonly practiced, I argue, suffers from some shortcomings. First, while literary Darwinists only weigh adaptation against by-product as competing explanations of literary behaviors, other alternatives, such as constraint and exaptation, should be considered as well. I attempt to demonstrate their relevance by evaluating the evidentiary criteria commonly employed by Literary Darwinists. Second, Literary Darwinists usually acknowledge the role of culture in human behavior and make references to Dual Inheritance theory (i.e., the body of empirical and theoretical work demonstrating that human behavior is the outcome of both genetic and cultural inheritance). However, they often do not fully appreciate the explanatory implications of dual inheritance. Literary Darwinism should be extended to include these recent refinements in our understanding of the evolution of human behavior.

Individuals have their own culture and social structure. They are accustomed to the norms and practices of that social structure. But the advent of new elements brings notable changes in their particular social pattern. These changes have impact on individual's personalities, thinking, and behavior; and the society takes a new look with distinguished characteristics. Ben Jonson, in Volpone, presents a group of diverse characters who seemed to be the representatives of the rising period of protocapitalist economic order. These characters are distinguished by what and how fraudulently they speak to others to boost money and wealth. They are in rivalry against each other, and mostly engaged in the acquirement of material goods over goodwill and moral obligation. Among others Volpone and Mosca are the leading representatives who constantly entice the different entrepreneurial potential to avariciously drive for money, and to finally shatter their hopes. The two mastermind plotters creatively shroud their true sort in entwining linguistic artifice merely to trick the wealth-maniac people by making themselves unsuspected and credible. The difference between right and wrong evaporates from society, and the principles and morality have been at stake. Such society depicted in the play gives a new mode of principles, morality, and good conduct. The attitudes to morality have been under consideration in the analysis.

Intensive summer course, July, 2016, Aarhus University. 

Course Description:

Over the past forty years, the evolutionary perspective has gradually developed into an explanatory framework that encompasses all things human: anatomy, physiology, behavior, and the products of the human mind. The evolutionary human sciences are now entering a mature phase. They have developed a sophisticated understanding of basic human motives and the logic of the human life cycle. The one most important weakness in much evolutionary psychology, until recently, has been an inadequate understanding of “culture,” and especially of “imaginative culture”: religion, ideology, myth, the arts, and intellectual life. That weakness is now being corrected by evolutionary thinking emerging from the humanities. Evolutionary studies of literary works have been entering a phase of mature command. This course is designed to acquaint students with the total set of ideas that enter into a biocultural understanding of prose fiction, graphic narratives, and film.

The premise of this course is that works of fiction center on the main substantive areas of human motives: survival, mating, parenting and family life, growing up, establishing an individual identity, engaging in the social life of a community, experiencing conflicts between communities, and pursuing the life of the mind. In each session of the course, we shall read background psychological studies on each of these themes and also read fictional works that center on the theme for that session.

There has been a recent surge of evolutionary explanations of art. In this article I evaluate one currently influential example, Brian Boyd’s recent book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009). The book offers a stimulating collection of findings, ideas and hypotheses borrowed from a wide range of research disciplines (philosophy of art and art criticism, anthropology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, neurobiology, ethology, etc.), brought together under the umbrella of evolution. However, in so doing Boyd lumps together issues that need to be separated, most importantly, organic and cultural evolution. In addition, he fails to consider alternative explanations to art as adaptation such as exaptation and constraint. Moreover, the neurobiological literature suggests current evidence of biological adaptation for most of the arts is weak at best. Given these considerations, I conclude by proposing to regard the arts instead as culturally evolved practices building on pre-existing biological traits.

Children's literature as a side effect of evolution Evolutionary, or Neo-Darwinist criticism is a direction of inquiry that explores the role of arts for survival and natural selection. As a theory based on biology and biopsychology, evolutionary criticism is extremely hostile toward most twentieth-century literary studies, in particular New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism and various directions of critical theory, that have been widely employed in children's literature scholarship. Instead, it claims that any study of literature and arts must take biological aspects of human existence into consideration. In this stance, evolutionary criticism constitutes a similar turn as ecocriticism, material studies, cognitive and corporeal narratology – interdisciplinary fields that bring firm scientific foundation into humanities. Evolutionary criticism draws our attention to the significance of natural and imagined orders in the history of humanity. Imagined orders, as opposed to natural orders, include

In the online magazine This View of Life, David Sloan Wilson published an essay on "The One Culture," arguing that the sciences and humanities are converging. In my response to his paper, I argue that there is still a wide gap between basic ideas in the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences.