Literature and evolution: A bio-cultural approach

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-23

  Boyd, Brian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950499804     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2005.0002     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. See for instance Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), the special issue reporting the 2003 symposium on the future of the journal and of theory.
2. Among many critiques of the suppositions that an evolutionary approach to the human implies determinism or impedes social change, see for instance Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999)
3. Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature after Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000)
4. and Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
5. Among discussions of evolution and literature, see Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995);
6. Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996);
7. Evolution and Literature Special Issue, Philosophy and Literature 25:2 (2001);
8. Jonathan Gottschall, "The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study," Philosophy and Literature 27 (2003): 255-68;
9. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004);
10. Jonathan Gottschall and D. S. Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
11. Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), p. xxxiii.
12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957; 2nd ed., 1970, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 9.
13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 15.
14. A. R. Braunmuller, in Ann Thompson, Thomas L. Berger, A. R. Braunmuller and Philip Edwards, Which Shakespeare? A User's Guide to Editions (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), p. 78.
15. Although Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin call universality "a hegemonic European critical tool" (The Empire Strikes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 149)
16. Ngūgī wa Thiong'o declares himself "an unrepentant universalist" (Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms [London: James Curry, 1993], p. xvii)
17. and Kwame Anthony Appiah observes that "antiuniversalists. use the term universalism as if it meant pseudouniversalism, and the fact is that their complain is not with universalism at all. What they truly object to-and who would not?-is Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism" (In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 58).
18. For a discussion of universals in human nature, see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991)
19. and in literature, Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
20. Daniel Dennett, "Postmodernism and Truth," World Congress of Philosophy Conference, August 13, 1998, http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.
21. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
22. Cf. Singer and Radcliffe Richards.
23. Lorraine Danson, "Whither Critical Inquiry?" Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 361-64.
24. R. M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1981)
25. cited in Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, "The Biological Foundation of Aesthetics," in Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger and David Epstein, eds., Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1988), p. 62.
26. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 104-10 for a lucid critique of the notion that visual perspective reflects the ideology of the unified subject.
27. Cf. Ernst Gombrich, The Image and The Eye (London: Phaidon, 1982), p. 282: "In fact the widespread view has recently been challenged that the conventional elements in photographs bar naïve subjects such as unsophisticated tribesmen from reading them."
28. There are minor individual differences, such as color blindness in 8% of the population and, recent research suggests, a fraction of women who may have partially tetrachromatic vision (Richard Hollingham, "In the Realm of Your Senses," New Scientist, 31 Jan 2004, pp. 40-43).
29. See John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
30. and Frans de Waal The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (New York, Basic Books, 2001).
31. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 4:2 (2003): 36-55.
32. Critiqued in Richard Levin, "The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide," PMLA 105 (1990): 491-504
33. and in Séan Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; rev. ed., 1998).
34. Jane Goodall, Through a Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
35. Cooperation and competition: Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (London: Penguin, 1990);
36. mate choice: Robert Trivers, "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection" (1972) in his Natural Selection and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
37. parent-child conflict: Trivers, "Parent-Offspring Conflict" (1974), in Trivers 2002; social emotions: Robert Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988).
38. Lee Cronk, That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
39. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988);
40. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002);
41. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
42. This argument is developed more fully in my "Evolutionary Theories of Art," in Gottschall and Wilson (forthcoming).
43. Theory of Mind: Simon Baron-Cohen, "Theory of Mind and Autism: A Fifteen-year Review," Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3-20.
44. Multiple-order intentionality: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993).
45. Events: Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack;
46. metarepresentation: Josef Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991);
47. analogy: Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
48. emotions: Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
49. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
50. Richard Alexander, in Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 138.
51. Ridley 2003, pp. 265-66.
52. See Storey 1996.
53. Seven basic emotions: Paul Ekman, "Afterword," in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Harper Collins, 1996).
54. Weighting to negative: Antonio Damasio, Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), p. 60.
55. Axelrod 1990.
56. Cheating: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 163-228; revenge: Frank 1988.
57. Universality of revenge: Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne, NY.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988): "In societies from every corner of the world, we can read of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of rituals that sanctify those vows" (pp. 225-56);
58. local differences: Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 327-29.
59. I offer a more detailed demonstration of this, looking at Viola's willow-cabin speech in Twelfth Night, in "Reduction or Expansion? Evolution Meets Literature" (forthcoming).
60. For reproductions and discussions of the sources, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII; The Major Tragedies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
61. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
62. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts," Substance (2001): 6-27; 24.
63. Lee Dugatkin and M. Alfieri, "Guppies and the Tit-for-Tat Strategy: Preference Based on Past Interaction," Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 28 (1991): 243-46.
64. Andrew White and Richard Byrne, Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
65. White and Byrne 1997, p. 313.
66. Sue Taylor Parker, et al., eds., Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
67. Boyer 2002.
68. Michael Neill, "Hamlet: A Modern Perspective," in William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), pp. 311-12.
69. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994), p. 174.
70. Brian Boyd, "Literature and Discovery," Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 313-33; 327.
71. Laura Bohannan, "Shakespeare in the Bush," Natural History, Aug-Sept. 1966;
72. Storey 1996; Michelle Sugiyama, "Cultural Relativism in the Bush: Towards a Theory of Narrative Universals," Human Nature (2003).
73. Cited in Brown 1991, p. 5.