Art and evolution: Spiegelman's The Narrative Corpse

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 31-57

  Boyd, Brian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950589732     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0008     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. For recent surveys, see David M. Buss, ed., The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Hoboken: Wiley, 2005);
2. R. I. M. Dunbar and Louise Barrett, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Oxford, 2007);
3. D. S. Wilson, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (New York: Delacorte, 2007).
4. Brian Boyd, "Evolutionary Theories of Art," in Jonathan Gottschall and D. S. Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 147-76;
5. Steven Pinker, "Toward a Consilient Study of Literature," Philosophy and Literature 31 (2007): 162-78.
6. For a recent overview, see Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (Cambridge: Bradford/MIT, 2005).
7. John Tooby and Irwin DeVore, "The Reconstruction of Hominid Behavioral Evolution through Strategic Modeling," in The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models, edited by W. G. Kinzey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
8. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 199.
9. H. Kobayashi and D. Kohshima, "Unique Morphology of the Human Eye and Its Adaptive Meaning: Comparative Studies on External Morphology of the Primate Eye," Journal of Human Evolution 40 (2001): 419-35.
10. Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam 2006), p. 36
11. and Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 29.
12. Humans satisfy the stringent conditions for group selection: see Elliott Sober and D. S. Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
13. and Peter J. Richerson and Richard Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
14. Colin Martindale, The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
15. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1986, 1991).
16. Art Spiegelman and R. Sikoryak, eds., The Narrative Corpse: A Chain Story by 69 Artists! (New York: Gates of Heck, 1995).
17. Hillard S. Kaplan and Steven W. Gangestad, "Optimality Approaches and Evolutionary Psychology: A Call for Synthesis," in Gangestad and Jeffrey A. Simpson, eds., The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies (New York: Guilford, 2007), pp. 121-29: 122.
18. This does not mean that cooperation cannot evolve, only that it requires special conditions. As Richard Dawkins notes, he could have equally called his first book The Cooperative Gene without changing another word: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), p. 158.
19. Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (New York: Norton, 2006).
20. Frans De Waal and Peter Tyack, eds., Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
21. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001);
22. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford, 2002);
23. Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Lanham: Altamira, 2004).
24. Similarly David Bordwell notes that films narrated with a fork in time allowing multiple futures compensate for the challenge of temporal dislocation by heightening accessibility in other areas of the plot: "Film Futures," Substance 97 (2002): 88-104.
25. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
26. Ekman, Emotion in the Human Face (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971/1982).
27. Wilson, Evolution, p. 163ff.
28. Paul Bingham, "Human Uniqueness: A General Theory," Quarterly Review of Biology, 74 (1999): 133-69.
29. See also Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), discussing the neuroscientist William Calvin, who in his 1996 How Brains Think "proposed that ballistic movements, such as throwing projectiles at a distant target, make special computational demands on nervous tissue. His idea was that the conquering of this particular problem, perhaps originally for the purposes of hunting, equipped the brain to do lots of other things as a by-product" (pp. 299-300).
30. See two anthologies, pro and contra: Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001)
31. and Daphne Patai and Will Corral, eds., Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
32. For a modern view of the mind's inaccessibility to introspection, see Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991/1993);
33. for critiques of Freud and his psychoanalytic heirs, see e.g. Frederick Crews, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)
34. and Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
35. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (2nd ed., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995);
36. and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, "New Science, Old Myth: An Evolutionary Critique of the Oedipal Paradigm," Mosaic 34 (2001): 121-36.
37. David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2005).
38. For a critique, see Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965).
39. See Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995);
40. Brian Boyd, "Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural Critique," American Scholar 75 (2006): 18-30;
41. Tony Hilfer, The New Hegemony in Literary Studies: Contradictions in Theory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
42. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (London: Penguin, 1990);
43. For a critique of the reification of cultural contexts, see Levin, Argument.
44. Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
45. Robert Trivers, "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection," in B. Campbell, ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man: 1871-1971 (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), pp. 136-79;
46. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon, 1999);
47. Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
48. Roy Baumeister, "Is There Anything Good About Men?," address to American Psychological Association, 2007, http://denisdutton.com/baumeister. htm.
49. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
50. Levin, Readings and Argument;
51. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
52. Richerson and Boyd, Genes.
53. Ultrasociality: Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber, 1996);
54. assessing individuality: De Waal and Tyack, Complexity.
55. Ekman, Emotion.
56. Gerd Gigerenzer et al., Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
57. Tradeoffs: Baumeister, "Men?"; unintended consequences: Ralph Rader, "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation," Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 250-52.
58. Bordwell, Style.
59. Henry Plotkin, Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993);
60. Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
61. Carroll, Evolution;
62. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
63. Language: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (London: Penguin, 1994);
64. Theory of Mind: Simon Baron-Cohen et al., eds., Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
65. Cause and Effect: Dan Sperber et al., eds., Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995);
66. and Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2007).
67. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
68. and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (forthcoming).
69. Own interests: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
70. appropriate: David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (London: Routledge, 2007).