Stefan Veleski

Despite being a hallmark of science fiction since the inception of the genre, narratives that feature first contact scenarios between humans and alien civilizations became particularly popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Critical analyses have long neglected the uniqueness of first contact narratives in this period, especially their clear 'mentorship-like' rather than 'invasion-like' nature and the invariable transformation of humanity that follows the event. This article attempts to fill this gap in the research by comparing how the aftermath of first contact is treated in novels by the 'Big Three' of science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End, 1953), Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961), and Isaac Asimov (The Gods Themselves, 1972). The article argues that the structure of first contact in these narratives is deliberately crafted to appeal to both contemporary cultural (mainly Cold War related) anxieties, and to hard-wired biological biases. In each of the novels discussed, this transformation sees humanity, through various means, become more like the aliens. This change results in a type of hyper-sociality, which can be viewed in a positive or negative light depending on the narrative context, the conflicting attitudes towards communality and individualism, and the contemporary zeitgeist of the Cold War. In addition to a close reading of the three texts, the article also employs a sentiment analysis, with the help of Matthew Jockers' 'syuzhet' package, in order to uncover the emotional valence of the transformation underlying the trope.

Despite the recent upswing of computational research on Victorian novels, it has largely overlooked insight from cultural evolution and the cognitive sciences. This study aims to contribute to this incipient scholarship by testing the hypothesis that novels containing content with a lower mean emotional valence are more likely to trigger recommendation-based transmission chains, and as a result tend to have greater cultural longevity. This study performs a correlation analysis between the mean sentiment and the contemporary popularity (using the number of user ratings from Goodreads) of a selection of late Victorian novels published in the United Kingdom between 1891 and 1901, taken from Project Gutenberg (n=846). Moreover, the study looks into the implications of this correlation for the differences between novels that were bestsellers at the time of publication and those that can be considered canonical today (that have recently had Broadview, Oxford University, or Penguin Press editions). The results show a weak negative correlation between the present day popularity and the mean emotional valence of the novels, which nevertheless holds true for both the bestselling and canonical novels. Moreover, canonical novels tend to have a lower mean emotional valence than the bestsellers.

This review of Alberto Acerbi's Cultural Evolution in The Digital Age provides a brief summary of the book and weighs its potential to impact media and cultural studies as a whole. Acerbi intertwines cultural evolution and cognitive anthropology to study the impact of the digital age on human behavior. Unlike digital doomsayers, Acerbi downplays the negative impact of digital media on our culture and social life and provides a solid, science-based take on the issue, which I argue should be more frequently featured in syllabi of media and cultural studies.

The last two years have seen the publication of two books in the genre of how-to fiction writing manuals that use science both as a selling point and as a genuine analytical paradigm. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr and The Science of Screenwriting by Paul Joseph Gulino and Connie Shears use insights from the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, while retaining their practical, how-to character. This review article goes through some of the main clusters of advice shared by the two books, dealing with information processing, attention allocation, the implications of human sociality for fiction, and story structure, while fitting their takes on these issues within the fields of biocultural criticism and cultural evolution. Despite containing occasional flaws and confusions about theory common in pioneering works, these books could be harbingers of change for the genre and an important step in the bottom-up infusion of biocultural theory into literary studies.

The aim of the thesis is to provide an overview of three contemporary action films: Dredd 3D, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road, through a so-called "bio-structuralist" approach - combining archetypal criticism, literary Darwinism, and narratology, into a unified, holistic theoretical model.
The thesis is divided in four main parts: (1) an introduction, that gives a rationale for the aim, scope, and the design of the thesis, (2) a theoretical framework, which provides both an overview of the theories and fits them in the general model, (3) a part including the case studies, that puts the theoretical approach to the test, and finally (4) a conclusion that gives a verdict on the feasibility of the model and summarizes the findings. A particular emphasis is put on the monomyth as a story paradigm that all the films in the case studies share, whose combination of a biologically dictated scaffolding, and cultural brickwork, is an excellent testing ground for the theoretical model.
In addition to the attempts of revealing glimpses of our evolved nature in the plots, narrative conventions, cinematography, themes, motivations, settings, and character networks in the films, the thesis attempts to balance the hardliner literary Darwinist stance of the dominance of biology over culture, with an acknowledgement of the existence of cultural transmission and stylistic evolution. Thus, the thesis proposes terminology that differentiates between cultural units totally dominated by biology, partially tied to it, and completely independent of it, albeit spread in ways  reminiscent of biological evolution.
The proposed theoretical model is shown to be a viable alternative to post-structuralist approaches as far as the study of action cinema is concerned, with its ample scope serving as its principal advantage.