- 9038 Old Bonhomme Road
Saint Louis, MO 63132
Joseph Carroll
University of Missouri - St. Louis, English, Faculty Member
- Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Literary Theory, Evolutionary Psychology, Emotional intelligence, Biocultural theory, and 28 moreGene-culture co-evolution, Victorian fiction, Neuroaesthetics, Affective Neuroscience, Human Evolution, Charles Darwin, Darwin, Darwinism, History and Philosophy of Biology, History of Biology, History of Science, Personality Psychology, Consilience, Literary Criticism, English, Critical Theory, Cultural Theory, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Poststructuralism, Romanticism, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Literature, English Literature, Violence, War and Literature, Homicide, Imagination, and William Shakespeareedit
- I got a PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley in 1981. In the eighties, I published books on Matthew Arnold and W... moreI got a PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley in 1981. In the eighties, I published books on Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens. Since the early 1990s, I've has been integrating literary studies with evolutionary social science.edit
We set up a questionnaire on the web in which we listed about 2,000 characters from 200 19th-century British novels. Approximately 519 people filled out 1,470 questionnaires on 435 characters from 144 novels. Each questionnaire contained... more
We set up a questionnaire on the web in which we listed about 2,000 characters from 200 19th-century British novels. Approximately 519 people filled out 1,470 questionnaires on 435 characters from 144 novels. Each questionnaire contained questions about the character's motives and personality and about the respondent's emotional responses to the character. Respondents also identified characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters. We hypothesized that the contrast between protagonists and antagonists would display the ethos of the novels as a whole. We conclude that the novels are designed to stigmatize dominance behavior and to promote an ethos of self-effacing cooperation. That is the same ethos that anthropologist Christopher Boehm identifies in hunter-gatherer culture. We infer that the novels fulfill the same kind of social function that gossip performs in hunter-gatherer cultures. The novels form a medium through which readers affirm their membership within a cooperative community.
Research Interests: Personality Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, English Literature, Literature, Literary Criticism, and 15 moreComputer Networks, Victorian Literature, Jane Austen, Literary Theory, Victorian studies (Literature), Literature And Science, Thomas Hardy, 19th Century British (Literature), Databases, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, 19th and 20th century English Literature, Software, Empirical Literary Studies, Quantitative Literary Study, and Science and Technology Studies
Essays collected between 2005 and 2010. The essays include efforts in constructive literary theory, theoretical polemics, practical literary criticism, quantitative literary study, and intellectual history. The constructive theory... more
Essays collected between 2005 and 2010. The essays include efforts in constructive literary theory, theoretical polemics, practical literary criticism, quantitative literary study, and intellectual history. The constructive theory includes (1) a model of human nature that integrates basic motives, basic emotions, and features of individual identity; (2) a theory of literary meaning as the interplay of perspectives among authors, readers, and characters; and (3) arguments on the adaptive function of literature and the other arts. Polemics include analysis of the underlying motives and assumptions in both traditional humanism and poststructuralism. There are two essays in quantitative literary study, both from a website questionnaire study on the organization of characters in 19th-century British novels. One summarizes results of the study as a whole. The other offers a quantitative analysis of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. There are three essays in intellectual history: "The Power of Darwin's Vision," "The Science Wars in a Long View," and "A Darwinian Revolution in the Humanities." Subjects of practical criticism include The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, and Hamlet,
Research Interests: British Literature, Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy of Science, Literature, History of Science, and 10 moreLiterary Criticism, History and Philosophy of Biology, Literary Theory, Literature And Science, Philosophies of Human Nature, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, 19th Century British (Literature), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Consilience, and Human nature
Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric,... more
Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric, Stephen Jay Gould, and narrow-school evolutionary psychology; offering examples of practical criticism of nineteenth-century British novels and novels depicting paleolithic life.
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I integrate evolutionary biology with ideas from the traditional humanist paradigm; critique poststructuralism and construct a biocultural alternative; critique many individual theorists (with the most extensive attention given to... more
I integrate evolutionary biology with ideas from the traditional humanist paradigm; critique poststructuralism and construct a biocultural alternative; critique many individual theorists (with the most extensive attention given to Derrida, Foucault, and Northrop Frye); and critique narrow forms of evolutionary psychology. Main constructive influences include Darwin and Huxley, ethologist Konrad Lorenz, developmental psychologist John Bowlby, and personality psychologist Hans Eysenck.
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Argues that Stevens is essentially a religious poet working in the Romantic, visionary tradition. Delineates his imaginative trajectory as a visionary quest culminating in the late poems of The Auroras of Autumn.
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Delineates the trajectory of Arnold's intellectual life and locates his work in relation to European cultural theory and British neo-classicism.
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https://www.prosocial.world/posts/evolution-human-nature-and-imagination The human capacity for creating an imaginative virtual world has been the culminating adaptation of the long human trajectory of gene-culture coevolution. There's... more
https://www.prosocial.world/posts/evolution-human-nature-and-imagination
The human capacity for creating an imaginative virtual world has been the culminating adaptation of the long human trajectory of gene-culture coevolution.
There's a filmed lecture that goes with this short essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymH55WogMuc
The human capacity for creating an imaginative virtual world has been the culminating adaptation of the long human trajectory of gene-culture coevolution.
There's a filmed lecture that goes with this short essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymH55WogMuc
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Ideology, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, and 14 moreLiterature And Science, Life History Theory, Imagination, Cognitive Literary Theory, Political Ideology, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Cultural Transmission, Literary and Cultural Theory, Human nature, Default Mode Network, Science and Literature, Resting State, Default Mode Networks, and Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans
Research Interests: British Literature, Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, English Literature, New Historicism, and 18 moreGenre studies, Literature, Shakespeare, Literary Criticism, Gender and Sexuality, Phenomenology, Literary Theory, Pedagogy, Cultural Materialism, Curriculum Development, Early Modern English drama, English Renaissance Literature, 17th Century British (Literature), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, New Economic Criticism, King Lear, Early Modern English Literature and Drama, and History of the Theater
Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and more importantly, in the interpretation of... more
Literature depicts emotions arising from conflict and makes them available to readers, who experience them vicariously. Literary meaning lodges itself not in depicted events alone but also, and more importantly, in the interpretation of depicted events: in the author's treatment of the depicted events; the reader's response to both the depicted events and the author's treatment; and the author's anticipation of the reader's responses. This chapter outlines possible stances toward violence, makes an argument for the decisive structural significance of violence in both life and literature, and then presents a representative sampling of violent acts in literature. The examples from literature are organized into the main kinds of human relationships: one's relation to oneself (suicide); sexual rivals, lovers, and marital partners; family members (parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins); communities (violence within social groups); and warfare (violence between social groups).
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Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to... more
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is.
Research Interests: British Literature, Gender Studies, English Literature, Literature, Queer Theory, and 12 moreLiterary Criticism, Gender and Sexuality, Gender, Victorian Literature, Literary Theory, Victorian studies (Literature), Literature And Science, Oscar Wilde, Aestheticism, 19th Century British (Literature), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, and The Picture of Dorian Gray
Abstract: Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering... more
Abstract: Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering Heights, delineate the norms Brontë shares with her projected audience, analyze her divided impulses, and explain the generic forms in which those impulses manifest themselves. Brontë herself presupposes a folk understanding of human nature in her audience.
Research Interests: British Literature, English Literature, Literature, Literary Criticism, Victorian Literature, and 8 moreLiterary Theory, Victorian studies (Literature), Literature And Science, 19th Century British (Literature), The Works of the Brontë Sisters, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Emily Bronte, and Wuthering Heights
People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of others. Literature contains much violence because violence reveals the underlying conflicts in all social relationships. Evolutionary... more
People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of others. Literature contains much violence because violence reveals the underlying conflicts in all social relationships. Evolutionary psychology offers the best explanatory framework for understanding social conflicts, but evolutionary psychology is still in the process of formulating theories about the way core motives interact with specific cultural constructs. To explain the significance of violence in particular works of literature, critics must analyze the interactions between human life history, specific cultural values, individual differences in authorial vision, and relations between the minds of authors and readers in response to characters. This chapter offers examples of that kind of analysis for three works of literature: Grimms’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf,” and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The analysis of “Little Red Riding Hood” identifies fear of predation and fear of strangers as core concerns in the story and examines the way symbolic images affect the emotions of child readers. The analysis of “The Werewolf” contrasts the author’s relations with characters and audience in that story with the authors’ relations with characters and audience in the other two works. The analysis of King Lear contrasts the emotional effects of tragedy with the emotional effects of action movies, identifies normative human universals as the basis for audience response, examines the way characters in the play and critics of the play seek meaning through religious ideas, contrasts religious ideas with Shakespeare’s naturalistic world view, and argues that intuitive insights into human life history form the moral core of the play.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Violence, Shakespeare, Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, and 13 moreBiocultural Anthropology, Imagination, Angela Carter, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Modern Fairy Tales, Folk and Fairy Tales, King Lear, Fairy tales, Literary Darwinism, Little Red Riding Hood, and Grimms Fairy Tales
The evolutionary human sciences are still in the process of forming a paradigm. Their model of human nature is not yet complete because it has not yet taken adequate account of the experience that forms the subject matter of the... more
The evolutionary human sciences are still in the process of forming a paradigm. Their model of human nature is not yet complete because it has not yet taken adequate account of the experience that forms the subject matter of the humanities. This essay is designed to help correct that deficiency. In the first part of the essay, I explain how scholars in the humanities can help construct the still developing model of human nature. In the second part, I argue that the proper subject of literary commentary is “meaning” and that meaning can be localized in the interaction of perspectives in authors, readers, and characters. In the third part, I argue that the main categories of human life history are also the main themes of fiction. In the final section, I offer suggestions about directions for future research.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Narrative, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature And Science, and 10 moreImagination, Philosophies of Human Nature, Narrative Theory, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Human nature, Literary Darwinism, and Human Life History Theory
For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives and tonal qualities in individual literary works and literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions... more
For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives and tonal qualities in individual literary works and literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions can now improve significantly on the insights available to folk psychology. It can provide scientifically valid categories for analyzing the subjects depicted in literature and the emotional configurations that make them meaningful. The dozens of emotions identified in empirical research can be organized and explained by an evolutionary understanding of human motives, developmental phases, neurological systems, and specifically human forms of cognitive and social development. This chapter organizes emotions in eight categories and uses those categories to outline several sets of genres characterized by the emotions they contain and evoke. Commentary on Jack London's "To Build a Fire" illustrates the interaction of emotions in characters, authors, and readers.
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This is a chapter in EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGINATIVE CULTURE, edited by Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, and me. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how imaginative verbal artifacts are produced by the imagination and in... more
This is a chapter in EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGINATIVE CULTURE, edited by Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, and me. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how imaginative verbal artifacts are produced by the imagination and in turn influence the imagination. Assimilating recent neuroscientific research on the evolution of modern brain shape and on the brain’s default mode network, we can now say with confidence that the imagination is a neurological reality, that it is lodged in specific parts of the brain, that it consists of an identifiable set of components and processes, that these components and processes have adaptive functions, and that in fulfilling its functions imagination has been a major causal factor in making Homo sapiens the dominant species on earth. The first section of the chapter defines the main terms in this argument. The second section describes the evolution of modern brain shape and suggests the role imagination has played in producing the complex of behaviors that characterize neurologically modern Homo sapiens. The third section describes the current neuroscientific understanding of the brain’s default mode network—the neurological locus of imagination. The fourth section describes three core processes of imagination used in constructing imaginative verbal artifacts: simulation, mental time travel, and perspective taking (also known as “Theory of Mind” and “mentalizing”). The three processes are illustrated with reference to a modern American novel, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The fifth section describes four specialized forms of imagination that deploy the core processes: dreaming, mind-wandering, autobiographical narratives, and counterfactual thinking. That section explains how these forms are involved in writing or reading literature and identifies a few literary works that illustrate them. The final section sums up the argument for the adaptive functions of literature.
Research Interests: Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), Theory of Mind, Narrative Psychology, Literary Theory, Literature And Science, and 14 moreImagination, Theory of Mind (Psychology), Cognitive Literary Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Perspective Taking, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Simulation, Counterfactual Thinking, Mental time travel, Evolution of mind, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, brain's default mode network, and the Human Revolution
This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that... more
This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that includes the whole scope of human behavior.
In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve three sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to help create different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.
Keywords: perspective taking, motives, psychology of reading, biocultural theory, evolutionary literary theory
In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve three sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to help create different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.
Keywords: perspective taking, motives, psychology of reading, biocultural theory, evolutionary literary theory
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Narrative, Cultural Theory, Theories of Meaning, and 37 moreNarrative Psychology, Literary Theory, Reader Response, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Imagination, Narrative Theory, Cognitive Literary Theory, Psychology of Reading, Identity theory, Authorship, Perspective Taking, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Meaning Making, Fiction, Reader-Response Theory, Simulation, Literary and Cultural Theory, Theory of Fiction, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Human nature, Literary Theory and Criticism, Personality Development, Psychology and Literature, Cognitive Literary Theory, Literature and Cognition, Evolutionary Psychology and Literature, Mentalizing, Authoriality and Authorship, Point of View, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, Empirical research on literary reading, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, brain's default mode network, and perspectival interplay
This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illustrates this framework with reference to specific literary works. The framework makes use of ideas from evolutionary psychology, human life... more
This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illustrates this framework with reference to specific literary works. The framework makes use of ideas from evolutionary psychology, human life history theory, terror management theory, the psychology of meaning, the psychology of fiction, and evolutionary literary theory. The chapter explains why humans create literary depictions of death, describes how imaginative meaning works in literature, characterizes the emotions evoked in literary depictions of death, and characterizes the attitudes toward death adopted by authors and characters. After constructing this theoretical framework, the chapter gives examples of literature that describe the whole span of an individual human life, then critiques three short stories that focus on specific themes in human life history. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates survival as a motive. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” illustrates death in childhood. D. H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” illustrates death in an intimate pair bond. A final section describes the state of research in the main fields that have contributed to the theoretical framework and suggests directions for further development.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Death Studies, Literature, Meaning of Life, Literary Theory, and 14 moreImagination, Terror Management Theory, Literature and Science (English), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Literature and Psychology, Literary Theory and Criticism, Psychology of Fiction, Psychology of Literature, Human Life History Theory, Emotions In Literature, Evolutionary Cultural Theory, and meaning in literature
The author identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness for literary study, and explains how they offer alternatives to current major forms of literary theory. He identifies the historical... more
The author identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness for literary study, and explains how they offer alternatives to current major forms of literary theory. He identifies the historical provenance and main contentions in evolutionary literary theory, and discusses the institutional position of evolutionary literary scholars. After describing the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts, the author proposes a synthesis of multiple hypotheses, delineates the scope of evolutionary literary criticism, and describes one large-scale study that integrates methods from the social sciences and literary criticism. The conclusion offers reflections on the future of evolutionary literary study.
Research Interests: Literary Theory, Literature And Science, Literature and Science (English), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, and 6 moreLiterary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, Psychology and Literature, Empirical Literary Studies, Scientific Study of Literature, and Future of Literary Studies
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... more
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.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Literary Criticism, Egalitarianism, Literary Theory, Literature and Society, and 19 moreLiterature And Science, Major Transitions (Evolution), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Cooperation, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Strong reciprocity, Evolutionary Literary Theory and Practice, Social Dominance Theory, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Inclusive Fitness Theory, Group Selection, Literary Criticism Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies Symbolism, Critical Analysis of Lord of The Flies, and Shakespeare and political thought
How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the " science wars " over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic... more
How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the " science wars " over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines.
Research Interests: Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Economics, Anthropology, Gene Culture Coevolution, and 45 moreHuman Behavioral Ecology, Philosophy of Science, Interdisciplinarity, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History and Philosophy of Biology, Sociobiology, Political Science, Culture, Evolutionary Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Social Constructionism, Biocultural Anthropology, Social construction, Literature And Science, Interdisciplinary Higher Education, Social Constructivism, Social Constructionism/ Constructivism, Arts-sciences interdisciplinarity, History of Human Sciences, Cognitive Literary Theory, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Behavioral Ecology, Interdisciplinary Studies, Evolutionary psychology (Evolution), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Social Sciences and Humanities, Human Behaviour, Political Sciences, Human behavior, the History and Theory of Liberal Arts Education, Science and Literature, Psychology and Literature, Arts and Sciences, Human Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Two Cultures, History of Humanities, History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Other interests: Philosophy of Science, Evolution Theory, Social and Evolutionary Psychology., Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Poststructuralism, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Michel Foucault, and 12 moreContemporary Fiction, Contemporary American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Contemporary American Fiction, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Jonathan Franzen, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Corrections Jonathan Franzen, Autobiographical Fiction, and Human Life History Theory
I use Hamlet to test the proposition that evolutionary psychology can advance on the common understanding embodied in the best of traditional humanist criticism. I develop Bradley's insight into Hamlet's depression by assimilating recent... more
I use Hamlet to test the proposition that evolutionary psychology can advance on the common understanding embodied in the best of traditional humanist criticism. I develop Bradley's insight into Hamlet's depression by assimilating recent research into the neurophysiology of depression.
Research Interests: British Literature, Personality Psychology, English Literature, Literature, Shakespeare, and 11 moreDepression, Literary Criticism, Personality Disorders, Literary Theory, Literature And Science, Early Modern English drama, English Renaissance Literature, 17th Century British (Literature), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Depression (Psychology), and Hamlet
Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the... more
Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parent-ing, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology , culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent , collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, and 26 moreHistory of Ideas, Social and Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, History and Philosophy of Biology, Cultural Theory, History of Social Sciences, Evolutionary Anthropology, Literary Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Dual Inheritance Theory (Archaeology), Evolutionary psychology (Evolution), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolution and Human Behavior, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Literary Theory and Criticism, Two Cultures, Science and Culture, History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Other interests: Philosophy of Science, Evolution Theory, Social and Evolutionary Psychology., Evolution of Hominin and Human Behaviour, and Human Life History Theory
The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the subjects traditionally studied in the humanities—is that part of culture that consists in shared and transmissible mental experiences that... more
The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the subjects traditionally studied in the humanities—is that part of culture that consists in shared and transmissible mental experiences that are aesthetically and emotionally modulated. Such experiences include religion, ideology, and the arts. Evolutionary cultural theory has heretofore concerned itself mostly with technology and social organization. Imaginative culture is the last major piece in the puzzle of human nature. After describing the historical and disciplinary context for this volume and summarizing its contents, the introduction describes a toolkit of concepts and methods used by the authors in this volume: Tinbergen’s four categories of ethological analysis (phylogeny, ontogeny, mechanism, and adaptive function), cross-species comparison, cross-cultural comparison, and the psychology of individual identity. Under the category “mechanism,” subheadings include neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the psychology of emotion. These concepts and methods are used as categories for describing subjects, observations, and arguments in the various chapters of the volume. “Directions for Further Research” identifies subject areas that have as yet received little attention from evolutionary scholars and scientists, describes opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative research, and discusses the tension between institutional disciplinary inertia and the impulses of advancing knowledge.
Research Interests: Gene Culture Coevolution, Philosophy of Mind, Cultural Theory, Imagination, Religion and cognition, and 10 moreLiterary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Psychology and Literature, Psychology and Art, Psychology and the arts, Neurosciences & Behavioral Sciences: evolutionary psychology, biological bases of cognition and perception, religion, Music and Psychology, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, and Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
This is an introduction to a forthcoming Farsi translation of Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice, which was published in 2011. I compare the essays in Reading Human Nature with my work in evolutionary literary... more
This is an introduction to a forthcoming Farsi translation of Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice, which was published in 2011. I compare the essays in Reading Human Nature with my work in evolutionary literary study published before and after 2011. Five main forms of effort are used to characterize all these publications: (1) fashioning theoretical structures, (2) developing specifically evolutionary methods for interpretive criticism, (3) combining interpretive criticism with statistical analyses of data on readers’ responses to characters in novels, (4) engaging polemically with competing ideas about human nature and imaginative culture, and (5) filling in conceptual categories with empirically derived information on subjects such as motives, emotions, sociality, and imagination.
Research Interests: Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), Literary Criticism, History and Philosophy of Biology, Literary Theory, History of Biology, and 11 moreLiterature And Science, Philosophies of Human Nature, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Consilience, Hamlet, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Human nature, Literary Theory and Criticism, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray
This is an overview of the 20 articles published as a "Research Topic" in Frontiers in Psychology. The "editorial" identifies the main concepts in an evolutionary understanding of imaginative culture and points toward two main areas in... more
This is an overview of the 20 articles published as a "Research Topic" in Frontiers in Psychology. The "editorial" identifies the main concepts in an evolutionary understanding of imaginative culture and points toward two main areas in which researchers need to come up to speed: neuroscientific work on the Default Mode Network, and current evolutionary research on emotions.
Research Interests:
The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and... more
The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-seeking and dominance behaviors that are stigmatized in such groups. This hypothesis was tested with an online questionnaire listing characters from 201 canonical British novels of the longer nineteenth century. 519 respondents generated 1470 protocols on 435 characters. Respondents identified the characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, judged the characters' motives according to human life history theory, rated the characters' traits according to the five-factor model of personality, and specified their own emotional responses to the characters on categories adapted from Ekman's seven basic emotions. As ex...
Research Interests: Sociology, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Personality Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, and 15 moreLiterature, Narrative, Literary Criticism, Victorian Literature, Literary Theory, Evolution, Victorian studies (Literature), Literature And Science, Narrative Theory, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Biological Sciences, Life history research and Narrative inquiry, Empirical Literary Studies, Quantitative Literary Study, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
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I identify converging lines of evidence for the proposition that the human mind has evolved, argue that the evolved character of the mind influences the products of the mind, including literature, and conclude that scholarly and... more
I identify converging lines of evidence for the proposition that the human mind has evolved, argue that the evolved character of the mind influences the products of the mind, including literature, and conclude that scholarly and scientific commentary on literature would benefit from being explicitly lodged within an evolutionary conceptual framework. I argue that a biocultural perspective has comprehensive scope and can encompass all the topics to which other schools of literary theory give attention. To support this contention, I appeal to axiomatic logic: the behavior of any organism is a result of interactions between its genetically determined characteristics and its environmental influences. Summarizing the debate over the adaptive function of literature, I argue that literature and its oral antecedents are adaptations, not merely by-products of adaptations.
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Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Literature, Biocultural Diversity, Literary Criticism, Adaptation, and 12 moreLiterary Theory, Evolution, Environmental Sustainability, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Pluralism, Natural Selection, Human nature, Organism, Literary Darwinism, Dominance, Graphing Jane Austen, and Empirical Literary Study
In "Against Literary Darwinism," Jonathan Kramnick attacks a straw man version of literary Darwinism. His conceptual framework implies that biology is restricted to a few modular cognitive processes, like those for the autonomic nervous... more
In "Against Literary Darwinism," Jonathan Kramnick attacks a straw man version of literary Darwinism. His conceptual framework implies that biology is restricted to a few modular cognitive processes, like those for the autonomic nervous system, and that everything else in human experience derives from "culture" and "history." That false dichotomy displays a shallow understanding of biocultural theory, and indeed Kramnick's essay is generally under-informed and out of date.
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This article is a contribution to the Literary Universals Project: https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/. The article is designed to identify universals of literary meaning. M. H. Abrams’s four constituents of the literary situation... more
This article is a contribution to the Literary Universals Project: https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/. The article is designed to identify universals of literary meaning. M. H. Abrams’s four constituents of the literary situation (author, reader, world, text) serve as "meta-universals"--conditions without which no other universals could exist. The author identifies four levels for the organization of meaning in literary texts: pan-human, culturally specific, individual persons, and individual literary works. Literature is defined as aesthetically modeled verbal constructs that depict or evoke subjective experience. Meaning is analyzed in three categories: subject themes, emotional tone, and aesthetic form. Literary texts are identified as contributions to imaginative virtual worlds occupied by all persons. The author argues that imagination is the last major component needed for an adequate basic model of the adapted mind. Streams of research converging on that last major component include evolutionary literary study, the psychology of fiction, narrative psychology, cognitive and affective literary theory, and neurological research on the Brain's Default Mode Network.
Research Interests: Emotion, Evolutionary Psychology, Comparative Literature, Literature, Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), and 18 moreNarrative Psychology, Human Universals, Literary Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Cognitive Literary Theory, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Emotions, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Literary Theory and Criticism, Cognitive Literary Theory, Literature and Cognition, Evolutionary Psychology and Literature, Psychology of Fiction, Affective Narratology, Stylistics and Thematics, Cognitive turn in literary studies, reader response and literary themes, Literary Universals, and brain's default mode network
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In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic... more
In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of the adaptationist program, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas. Over the past decade, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured. Many evolutionists in the humanities argue that basic human motives are channeled into specific cultural norms, that specific cultural norms are articulated in imaginative form through myths, legends, rituals, images, songs, and stories, and that humans universally regulate their behavior in accordance with beliefs and values that are made vividly present to them in the arts. Evolutionary literary scholars aim at analyzing the thematic, tonal, and formal features of literary works; locating the works in a cultural context; explaining the cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions; registering the responses of readers; describing the sociocultural, political, and psychological functions the works fulfill; locating those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature; and linking works comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal elements, affective elements, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Literary Theory, Science, Technology and Literature, Biocultural Anthropology, and 10 moreLiterature And Science, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Literature and Psychology, Literary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, Psychology and Literature, Anthropology and Literature, Literature and Anthropology, and The Two Cultures
The practice of making and consuming imaginative verbal artifacts appears in all known cultures. People all over the world, in all ecological and social conditions, play with the sounds and meanings of words, create imaginary worlds with... more
The practice of making and consuming imaginative verbal artifacts appears in all known cultures. People all over the world, in all ecological and social conditions, play with the sounds and meanings of words, create imaginary worlds with intentional agents, goals, and symbolic images, and produce fantasy structures in which characters and events are linked in thematically significant ways to produce tonally modulated outcomes. All forms of cultural imagination—religious, ideological, artistic, and literary—are imbued with the passions derived from the evolved and adapted dispositions of human nature. Human action depends on the human sense of value and meaning. Literature and the other arts provide a means for making the value and meaning of experience available to the imagination.
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An overview of evolutionary literary study (ELT), outlining the history, defining central topics and core principles, positioning the field in relation to contiguous fields such as cognitive rhetoric, contrasting it with... more
An overview of evolutionary literary study (ELT), outlining the history, defining central topics and core principles, positioning the field in relation to contiguous fields such as cognitive rhetoric, contrasting it with poststructuralism, and describing salient works in the field. Thirty-five scholars respond to the target article. The rejoinder categorizes the responses by common themes such as comments on the possibility of unified knowledge, evolutionary cultural theory, reduction, and the adaptive function of literature and other arts.
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In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker offers a splendidly fluent and lucid survey of evolutionary psychology. Pinker propounds the view that the mind has evolved under the shaping pressure of natural selection and that it has developed a... more
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker offers a splendidly fluent and lucid survey of evolutionary psychology. Pinker propounds the view that the mind has evolved under the shaping pressure of natural selection and that it has developed a number of mental" modules"--chunks of cognitive software--designed to solve specific adaptive problems.
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I envision three alternative scenarios for literary study: one in which literary Darwinism remains outside the mainstream of literary study; one in which literary Darwinism is incorporated as just another of many different “approaches” to... more
I envision three alternative scenarios for literary study: one in which literary Darwinism remains outside the mainstream of literary study; one in which literary Darwinism is incorporated as just another of many different “approaches” to literature; and a third in which the evolutionary human sciences fundamentally transform and subsume all literary study. In this third scenario, the poststructuralist literary establishment crumbles quietly from within, succumbing to intellectual dry rot, and literary Darwinism attains to full maturity by absorbing the most comprehensive ideas in the evolutionary human sciences and integrating them with ideas specific to literary study.
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Research Interests: Aesthetics, Visual Studies, Art History, Art Theory, Interdisciplinarity, and 23 moreContemporary Art, Literary Criticism, Gender, Culture, Literary Theory, History of Art, Imagination, Literature and Philosophy, Artistic Research, Philosophy and Literature, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Art writing, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Curation, Literary Darwinism, Quantitative Literary Study, Darwinian Literary Studies, Empirical Literary Study, Writing in Visual Art, Artists’ Books, and Art ‘beyond the gallery’
This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal makes use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the humanities.... more
This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal makes use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the humanities. These fields now have before them the prospect of a synthesis that would produce, for the first time, a comprehensive and scientifically robust understanding of the human condition. ESIC is founded on the assumption that imaginative culture is an essential part of the human condition. Evolutionary cultural study is still establishing itself as a distinct field. ESIC provides a nexus for research in that field—helping scholars stay informed about the newest thinking in evolutionary cultural theory, illuminating connections between findings in seemingly disparate disciplines, establishing a body of common knowledge, and setting standards for informed and theoretically competent commentary. Already, evolutionary scholars and scientists who focus on humanistic subjects have produced a substantial body of work, much of it good, some of it excellent. That kind of work points a way toward the future. This journal is meant to be an avenue into that future.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, and 44 morePhilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Social Sciences, Interdisciplinarity, Popular Culture, Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), History of Science, Sociobiology, History of Social Sciences, Culture, Evolutionary Anthropology, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, Philosophy of Social Science, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Imagination, Intellectual and cultural history, Philosophies of Human Nature, History of Human Sciences, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Interdisciplinary Studies, Religion and Popular Culture, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Evolutionary Aesthetics, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Human nature, Human Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, History of Humanities, History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Humanities and Social Science, Social Science and Humanities, Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, Human and Social Sciences, Philosophy of (Social) Science, and Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Human Evolution, Literature, Narrative, Literary Criticism, and 9 moreLiterary Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Narrative Theory, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Evolution and Human Behavior, Comparative literature, Literary theory, and Historical Fiction
Abstract Over the past forty years or so, the evolutionary human sciences have gradually developed a good working model of human nature. That model includes basic emotions and basic motives such as survival, mating, parenting, favoring... more
Abstract Over the past forty years or so, the evolutionary human sciences have gradually developed a good working model of human nature. That model includes basic emotions and basic motives such as survival, mating, parenting, favoring kin, and acting as members of a social group. Cognitive and social adaptations include the capacity for envisioning the perspectives of other people. Meaning in fiction can be located in the interplay of perspectives among authors, characters, and readers.
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Biocultural literary theorists identify literature and its oral antecedents as a subsystem within the human adaptive complex: the total set of causally interactive and adaptively functional structures that have emerged over the course of... more
Biocultural literary theorists identify literature and its oral antecedents as a subsystem within the human adaptive complex: the total set of causally interactive and adaptively functional structures that have emerged over the course of human evolutionary history. The foundational theories currently accepted in the academic literary establishment are incompatible with a biocultural understanding of the evolved and adapted character of the human mind. Psychological and social theories that form part of the amalgam designated “poststructuralism” identify important areas of human concern but can now be replaced with empirically grounded concepts that are more complete, more correct, and more nuanced. The evolutionary human sciences offer good alternatives to Marxism, Freudianism, radical feminism, and Foucauldian cultural theory. The most important elements in biocultural theory are human life history theory and gene-culture coevolution. Human life history identifies the core motivations that emerge in the various phases and social roles in the human life cycle. Gene-culture coevolution adds to that set of basic motivations the uniquely human dispositions for generating cumulative cultural innovations in technology and social organization and also for generating imaginative culture: the arts, religions, myths, and ideologies. Biocultural theorists argue that basic human motives are channeled into specific cultural norms that are articulated in imaginative form through myths, legends, rituals, images, songs, and stories. Biocultural theory offers an opportunity for the cumulative development of literary research in company with our developing scientific understanding of human motives, emotions, identity, social interactions, and forms of cognition.
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There have been previous efforts to establish a scientifically based criticism--Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism. All these efforts have failed. Why would your effort be any different?" Not a bad question, but we have a good... more
There have been previous efforts to establish a scientifically based criticism--Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism. All these efforts have failed. Why would your effort be any different?"
Not a bad question, but we have a good answer. This effort is different because the historical moment is ripe. We now have, for the first time, an empirically grounded psychology that is sufficiently robust to account for the products of the human imagination.
Not a bad question, but we have a good answer. This effort is different because the historical moment is ripe. We now have, for the first time, an empirically grounded psychology that is sufficiently robust to account for the products of the human imagination.
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Reproduction is centrat to the logic of evolution, and as a result, it is central to human motivational systems. Any given culture organizes reproduction in a way specific to that culture, but evolutionary anthropologists and... more
Reproduction is centrat to the logic of evolution, and as a result, it is central to human motivational systems. Any given culture organizes reproduction in a way specific to that culture, but evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists have identified certain sex differences that hold good across diverse cultures, and they cogently argue that these" human universais" reflect species-typical motivational structures. In all known societies, males are dominant.
Research Interests: English Literature, Literature, Literary Criticism, Willa Cather, Victorian Literature, and 11 moreJane Austen, Human Universals, Literary Theory, Victorian studies (Literature), Literature And Science, Thomas Hardy, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Charlotte Brontë, Arnold Bennett, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Pride and Prejudice
In the past ten years or so, ecological literary criticism—that is, criticism concentrating on the relationship between literature and the natural environment—has become one of the fastest-growing areas in literary study. Ecocritics now... more
In the past ten years or so, ecological literary criticism—that is, criticism concentrating on the relationship between literature and the natural environment—has become one of the fastest-growing areas in literary study. Ecocritics now have their own professional association, their own academic journal, and an impressive bibliography of scholarly studies. Ecocritical scholars divide their attention between “nature writing” and ecological themes within all literature.
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Research Interests: Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Imagination, Literature and Philosophy, and 6 morePhilosophy and Literature, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, and Evolutionary Aesthetics
The cognitive rhetoricians have introduced the idea of cognitive domains into literary theory, but they have not yet developed a model for a comprehensive, species-typical structure of human motives. Evolutionary psychology can provide... more
The cognitive rhetoricians have introduced the idea of cognitive domains into literary theory, but they have not yet developed a model for a comprehensive, species-typical structure of human motives. Evolutionary psychology can provide this model. Elemental human motives and basic emotions provide the deep structure of literary representations, and this deep structure serves to organize the particularities of circumstance and individual identity.
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Before the advent of purely culturalist ways of thinking in the early decades of the twentieth century, the idea of “human nature” was deeply ingrained in the literature and the humanistic social theory of the West. 1 In the past three... more
Before the advent of purely culturalist ways of thinking in the early decades of the twentieth century, the idea of “human nature” was deeply ingrained in the literature and the humanistic social theory of the West. 1 In the past three decades, ethology, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology have succeeded in making the idea of “human nature” once again a commonplace of public discourse, but the actual shape and content of human nature, even among Darwinian social scientists, remains controversial.
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In the past thirty years, a revolution has taken place in the social sciences. When anthropology and sociology were founded as academic disciplines in the early years of the nineteenth century, both disciplines segregated themselves from... more
In the past thirty years, a revolution has taken place in the social sciences. When anthropology and sociology were founded as academic disciplines in the early years of the nineteenth century, both disciplines segregated themselves from evolutionary biology and insisted that" culture" or" society" were autonomous forces that shaped human behavior (Brown, pp. 1-38; DM Buss, 1999, part one; Degler; Fox, 1989, chaps. 3 & 4; Freeman, 1992, 1999, pp. 17-27; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 28).
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Research Interests: Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Science, History of Biology (History), History of Science, History and Philosophy of Biology, and 19 moreComputer Networks, Evolution, History of Biology, Darwinism, Databases, Ernst Mayr, Software, Evolutionary theory, Science Studies, Charles Darwin, Lamarckism, Origin of species, Victorianism, Lyell, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Peter Bowler, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Martin Fichman, and Science and Technology Studies
This is a collection of 21 articles published as an eBook by Frontiers in Psychology. This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its... more
This is a collection of 21 articles published as an eBook by Frontiers in Psychology.
This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its manifestations but unified by species-typical sets of biologically grounded motives, emotions, and cognitive dispositions. The topic encompasses four main areas of research in the evolutionary human sciences: (1) evolutionary psychology and anthropology, which have fashioned a robust model of evolved human motives organized systemically within the phases and relationships of human life history; (2) research on gene-culture coevolution, which has illuminated the mechanisms of social cognition and the transmission of cultural information; (3) the psychology of emotions and affective neuroscience, which have gained precise knowledge about the evolutionary basis and neurological character of the evolved emotions that give power to the arts, religion, and ideology; and (4) cognitive neuroscience, which has identified the Default Mode Network as the central neurological location of the human imagination. By integrating these four areas of research and by demonstrating their value in illuminating specific kinds of imaginative culture, this Research Topic aims at incorporating imaginative culture within an evolutionary conception of human nature.
This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its manifestations but unified by species-typical sets of biologically grounded motives, emotions, and cognitive dispositions. The topic encompasses four main areas of research in the evolutionary human sciences: (1) evolutionary psychology and anthropology, which have fashioned a robust model of evolved human motives organized systemically within the phases and relationships of human life history; (2) research on gene-culture coevolution, which has illuminated the mechanisms of social cognition and the transmission of cultural information; (3) the psychology of emotions and affective neuroscience, which have gained precise knowledge about the evolutionary basis and neurological character of the evolved emotions that give power to the arts, religion, and ideology; and (4) cognitive neuroscience, which has identified the Default Mode Network as the central neurological location of the human imagination. By integrating these four areas of research and by demonstrating their value in illuminating specific kinds of imaginative culture, this Research Topic aims at incorporating imaginative culture within an evolutionary conception of human nature.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Cultural Theory, Cognitive Science of Religion, and 15 moreImagination, Visual Arts, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Science and the Arts, Evolution and Human Behavior, Default Mode Network, Media and Culture Studies, Visual Culture and Media Studies, Psychology and Literature, Psychology and Art, Humanities and Social Sciences, Music and Psychology, and Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human... more
This pioneering volume offers an expansive introduction to the relatively new field of evolutionary studies in imaginative culture. Contributors from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the humanities probe the evolved human imagination and its artefacts. The book forcefully demonstrates that imagination is part of human nature. Contributors explore imaginative culture in seven main areas:
Imagination:
Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions
Myth and Religion
Aesthetic Theory
Music
Visual and Plastic Arts
Video Games and Films
Oral Narratives and Literature
Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media.
Imagination:
Evolution, Mechanisms and Functions
Myth and Religion
Aesthetic Theory
Music
Visual and Plastic Arts
Video Games and Films
Oral Narratives and Literature
Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture widens the scope of evolutionary cultural theory to include much of what “culture” means in common usage. The contributors aim to convince scholars in both the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences that biology and imaginative culture are intimately intertwined. The contributors illuminate this broad theoretical argument with comprehensive insights into religion, ideology, personal identity, and many particular works of art, music, literature, film, and digital media.
Research Interests: Music, Aesthetics, Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), Narrative Psychology, Cognitive Science of Religion, and 9 moreLiterature And Science, Imagination, Cognitive Literary Theory, Visual Arts, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Film and Media Studies, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, and Evolutionary Cultural Theory
A journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, popular culture, religion, ideology, politics. Two volumes per year. Double-blind peer review. Regularly publishes multiple book reviews in the... more
A journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, popular culture, religion, ideology, politics. Two volumes per year. Double-blind peer review. Regularly publishes multiple book reviews in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities.
Research Interests: American Literature, Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Comparative Literature, Gene Culture Coevolution, and 32 moreEnglish Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Literature, Interdisciplinarity, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, Sociobiology, Popular Culture and Religious Studies, Evolutionary Anthropology, Neuroaesthetics, Literary Theory, Latin American literature, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Cognitive Film Theory, Philosophies of Human Nature, Arts-sciences interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Studies, Religion and Popular Culture, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolution and Human Behavior, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Human nature, Evolutionary Literary Theory, Literary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, Cognitive Literary Theory, Literature and Cognition, Evolutionary Psychology and Literature, Cognitive Approaches to Literature & Film, Biopoetics, and Culture-Gene Coevolution
This volume gives evidence for the unity of knowledge in evolutionary biology, the evolutionary social sciences, and the humanities. It contains 14 separately authored essays, a foreword by Alice Dreger, a theoretical introduction by... more
This volume gives evidence for the unity of knowledge in evolutionary biology, the evolutionary social sciences, and the humanities. It contains 14 separately authored essays, a foreword by Alice Dreger, a theoretical introduction by Joseph Carroll, and afterwords by David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Gottschall. Edward O. Wilson, Christopher Boehm, Herbert Gintis, Michael Rose, and Henry Harpending discuss human social evolution. Barbara Oakley integrates psychology and engineering. Dan P. McAdams delineates a model of human identity, and Carroll and his collaborators use a similar model for a quantitative study of Victorian novels. Ellen Dissanayake and John Hawks probe the mystery behind the markings ancestral humans made on stones. Brian Boyd uses cognitive psychology to analyze poetry and comics. Catherine Salmon and Mathias Clasen use evolutionary psychology to explain salient genres of popular culture: horror fiction, professional wrestling, romance novels, and male adventure novels.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Biology, Personality Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, and 22 moreMoral Psychology, Social Sciences, Personality, Evolution of cooperation (Evolutionary Biology), Sociobiology, Evolutionary Anthropology, Literary Theory, Morality (Social Psychology), Science, Technology and Literature, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Evolutionary Epistemology, Interdisciplinary Studies, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Personality (Psychology), Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Evolution and Human Behavior, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Social and Personality Psychology, and Cross-disciplinary Research Centred In Evolutionary Biology/ Biological Anthropology/ Evolutionary Psychology
An anthology of essays and book excerpts, most of them previously published; designed as a complete package that could be used as the core for a course on evolution, literature, and film; contains sections on evolutionary biology;... more
An anthology of essays and book excerpts, most of them previously published; designed as a complete package that could be used as the core for a course on evolution, literature, and film; contains sections on evolutionary biology; evolutionary literary theory; the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts; essays in interpretive criticism; and exercises in empirical literary study. The introduction is co-authored by the three editors.
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The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introduction, substantial selections from other works by Darwin (letters, autobiography, Descent of Man, etc.); background works (Lyell, Malthus,... more
The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introduction, substantial selections from other works by Darwin (letters, autobiography, Descent of Man, etc.); background works (Lyell, Malthus, Lamarck, Spencer, Huxley, et al.),and a guide to authors cited by Darwin.
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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... more
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.
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.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Literary Criticism, and 22 moreCultural Theory, Evolutionary Anthropology, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, Literature And Science, Cultural Anthropology, Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Evolutionary Literary Theory, Literary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Evolution and Religion, Exchanges between literature, science and politics, and specifically the relationship between poetry and nineteenth-century theories of geology and evolution., Art and Biology, Biopoetics, The Two Cultures, and Evolutionary Cultural Theory
First third of the first volume, 2010, Co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll
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co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll
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co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll
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co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll
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co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll
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These two books on fictional narratives and neuroscience adopt cultural constructivist perspectives that reject the idea of evolved human motives and emotions. Both books contain information that could be integrated with other research in... more
These two books on fictional narratives and neuroscience adopt cultural constructivist perspectives that reject the idea of evolved human motives and emotions. Both books contain information that could be integrated with other research in a comprehensive and empirically grounded theory of narrative, but they both fail to construct any such theory. In order to avoid subordinating the humanities to the sciences, Comer and Taggart avoid integrating their separate disciplines: neuroscience (Comer) and narrative theory (Taggart). They draw no significant conclusions from the research they summarize. Armstrong subordinates neuroscience to the paradoxes of phenomenology and 4E cognition. His prose develops not by consecutive reasoning but by the repetitive intonation of paradoxical formulas. The failures in theoretical construction displayed by these two books run parallel with weaknesses in the interpretive criticism with which they illustrate their ideas. The different ways in which the books fail are sometimes comical but nonetheless instructive. The failures inadvertently point toward the radical changes in humanist thinking that would be necessary for success in integrating neuroscience and narrative theory.
Research Interests: Neuroscience, Evolutionary Psychology, Literary Criticism, Cognitive Narratology, Narrative Psychology, and 15 morePhenomenology, Narratology, Literary Theory, Literature And Science, Imagination, Narrative Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Cognitive Poetics, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Literary Theory and Criticism, Default Mode Network, 4E Cognition, and Saturday Ian mcewan
Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's therapeutic program is presented as an alternative to the... more
Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's therapeutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that identifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and understanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuroscience to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher's chains of reasoning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletcher's book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher's rhetorical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher's book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.
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abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isolate elementary causal forces and organize them systematically. The elements of a usable model for evolved human sociality have become... more
abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isolate elementary causal forces and organize them systematically. The elements of a usable model for evolved human sociality have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. The central idea in a usable model of human sociality is that the identity of the social group is integral to individual identity. In addition to that one central idea, a minimum of seven concepts is necessary to construct a model of sociality that includes the complex forms of organization in post-agricultural societies: (1) dominance, (2) egalitarianism or reverse dominance, (3) leadership, (4) internalized norms, (5) strong reciprocity or third-party enforcement of norms, (6) legal institutions, and (7) legitimacy in the exercise of power. These seven concepts can be reduced to four components: power, values, individuals, and groups. This model of evolved human sociality moves beyond the inconclusive debate between proponents of inclusive fitness and proponents of group selection. It also offers a distinct alternative to the identity politics that currently pervade literary and cultural study.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Community Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Legitimacy and Authority, and 36 morePower (social), Evolution of cooperation (Evolutionary Biology), Leadership, Cultural Theory, Evolution of Morality, Sociobiology, Identity politics, Culture, Egalitarianism, Multilevel selection (Evolutionary Biology), Morality (Social Psychology), Contemporary Social Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Altruism, Social Norms, Community, Socio-cultural theory, Philosophies of Human Nature, Major Transitions (Evolution), Critical and Cultural Theory, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Social Norms (Psychology), Cooperation, Human nature, Strong reciprocity, Moral Foundations Theory, Social Dominance Theory, Steven Pinker, Edward Osborn Wilson, Social Selection, Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, Norms and Institutions, Francis Fukuyama, and Jonathan Haidt
Review of three books: Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire, and Cochran's and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion.
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I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrote a response. The editor invited me to write a rejoinder to Davies's response. I did, but when Davies declined to answer my rejoinder, the... more
I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrote a response. The editor invited me to write a rejoinder to Davies's response. I did, but when Davies declined to answer my rejoinder, the editor declined to publish my rejoinder. Evidently, the editor wished Davies to have the last word. I am here attaching my original critique, Davies's response, and my rejoinder to Davies's response.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Aesthetics, Literary Theory, Imagination, Literature and Philosophy, and 8 morePhilosophy and Literature, Adaptive function of literature and the other arts, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Literary Darwinism, Natural and Sexual Selection, and Imaginative Virtual Worlds
SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular... more
SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular success with an evolutionary book in the humanities. The Gottschall and Wilson collection The Literary Animal (2005) was a success with critics outside the postmodern establishment—in scientific journals and the lay press—but was not a blockbuster at the box office.
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Yu Shiyi teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University in Beijing. This interview was conducted in September 2015. It was translated into Chinese and published in China Reading Weekly in late 2j015.
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Comments on paradigm-level changes in literary study
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David Sloan Wilson interviewed me for a feature in the online magazine This View of Life. Two main subjects of the interview are the new journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture and the edited essay collection Darwin's Bridge:... more
David Sloan Wilson interviewed me for a feature in the online magazine This View of Life. Two main subjects of the interview are the new journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture and the edited essay collection Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences. I also discuss the history of evolutionary literary study, the obsolescence of narrow-school evolutionary psychology, the centrality of gene-culture coevolution to human evolution, and the backlash against Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Philosophy of Science, Transnational and World History, Literature, and 27 moreCultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), History of Science, History of Social Sciences, Race and Ethnicity, World History, Evolutionary Anthropology, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, Philosophy of Social Science, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Imagination, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, History of Race and Ethnicity, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolution and Human Behavior, Literary and Cultural Theory, Literary Theory and Criticism, Evolution, history of science and psychology, interbehavioral psychology, History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Edward Osborn Wilson, Connections between Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, Narrative Fiction and the History of Ideas, Francis Fukuyama, Philosophy of Mind: Imagination, and Culture-Gene Coevolution
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A powerpoint presentation for an ongoing project. This version was designed to introduce literary Darwinism to a Chinese audience.
Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Literary Criticism, Life history, Literary Theory, Science, Technology and Literature, and 11 moreBiocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Life History Evolution, Literary Darwinism or Evolutionary Literary Study, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Thematic Analysis, Literary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, and Cognitive Literary Theory, Literature and Cognition, Evolutionary Psychology and Literature
During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material. Those courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate... more
During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material. Those courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate seminar in literary theory that I have taught fourteen times; and (2) eleven interdisciplinary seminars, eight for undergraduates, and three for graduate students. In this article, I describe all these courses and explain how the graduate seminar in literary theory has changed over time, as both evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism have become more mature and sophisticated. Being committed to a biocultural perspective, I discuss the problem of advocacy, how to make sure that students understand that they are free to think out their own positions. I give examples of paper topics, describe the way students respond to evolutionary ideas, and sketch out an ideal curriculum centered on evolutionary theory as a comprehensive explanatory framework within which to synthesize research in the social sciences and the humanities.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Education, Literature, Critical Pedagogy, Literary Criticism, and 11 moreLiterary Theory, Pedagogy, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Interdisciplinary Higher Education, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Interdisciplinary research, Literary Theory and Criticism, and Two Cultures
This course is cross-listed as a seminar in an Honors College and a literary theory course for English majors. The course is built around topics derived from human life history theory: survival, growing up, mating, family life, life in a... more
This course is cross-listed as a seminar in an Honors College and a literary theory course for English majors. The course is built around topics derived from human life history theory: survival, growing up, mating, family life, life in a social group, encountering aliens and enemies, and the life of the mind. Class meets once a week. In each class session, students read some theoretical essays on the topic, and some literary examples in which the topic is salient. The backbone of the theoretical offerings are chapters in David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th edition). The textbook chapters are supplemented by articles written by evolutionary social scientists and evolutionary literary scholars. The literary texts include poems, short stories, short novels, a play (Hamlet), and graphic novels and stories. Students are given quizzes as reading checks for each week's reading. They write two short papers and one longer paper.
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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,... more
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.
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.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Gene Culture Coevolution, English Literature, Literature, and 22 moreCultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, World Literature, Literature and Science (English), Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Literary and Cultural Theory, Evolutionary Literary Theory, Literary Theory and Criticism, Science and Literature, Cognitive Literary Theory, Literature and Cognition, Evolutionary Psychology and Literature, Film and Literature, Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Literature and Film, Human Life History Theory, The Two Cultures, and English Literature and Film Studies
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A powerpoint presentation on categories used for organizing works of literature; example of using life history categories to cut themes at their joints.
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This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal is designed to make use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the... more
This short essay is designed as an introduction to the new journal EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN IMAGINATIVE CULTURE (ESIC). The journal is designed to make use of an opportunity that has only recently opened up for the social sciences and the humanities. These fields now have before them the prospect of a synthesis that would produce, for the first time, a comprehensive and scientifically robust understanding of the human condition. ESIC is founded on the assumption that imaginative culture is an essential part of the human condition. Evolutionary cultural study is still establishing itself as a distinct field. ESIC will provide a nexus for research in that field—to help scholars stay informed about the newest thinking in evolutionary cultural theory, to illuminate connections between findings in seemingly disparate disciplines, to help establish a body of common knowledge, and to set standards for informed and theoretically competent commentary. Already, evolutionary scholars and scientists who focus on humanistic subjects have produced a substantial body of work, much of it good, some of it excellent. That kind of work points a way toward the future. This journal is meant to be an avenue into that future.
Research Interests: Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, History of Ideas, and 37 moreLiterature, Popular Culture, Cultural Transmission (Evolutionary Biology), Poststructuralism, History and Philosophy of Biology, Cultural Theory, Cooperation (Evolutionary Psychology), Sociobiology, Culture, Popular Culture and Religious Studies, Literary Theory, Cultural Evolution, Philosophy of Social Science, Biocultural Anthropology, Literature And Science, Philosophies of Human Nature, History of Human Sciences, Critical and Cultural Theory, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, History and philosophy of science (History), Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Religion and Popular Culture, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Biocultural theory, Consilience, Evolution and Human Behavior, History of Literary Criticism, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Human nature, Humanities and Social Sciences, History of Humanities, History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Other interests: Philosophy of Science, Evolution Theory, Social and Evolutionary Psychology., Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities, Philosophy of (Social) Science, and History of Human and Social Sciences
http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/index A new journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, society, popular culture. Issue 1.1 appeared July 2017:... more
http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/index
A new journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, society, popular culture. Issue 1.1 appeared July 2017: http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/issue/view/10 Accepting submissions.
A new journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, society, popular culture. Issue 1.1 appeared July 2017: http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/issue/view/10 Accepting submissions.