Adaptive function of literature and the other arts

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.

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.

Critics have argued that the African literary artist [traditional or modern] carries out some kind of function. This includes teaching his audience through his work, having qualified as the keeper of his society’s mores. Yet no critic has closely interrogated this stance and the constitution of the space of representation and teaching; what he really teaches; the shades of opinion that make him seem a recorder of his society’s mores; and other sundry lacunae. This article proceeds by problematising such terms as artist, society, mores and teaching, on one hand, and by invoking such theoretical concepts of literature enunciated by critics, from Aristotle to Akwanya, on the other, in order to dismantle the argument that the artist teaches. It also argues that the notion of function, either teaching or recording of mores, privileges unity of message. The sense of unity is later exploded via exploring the chaotic meaning in Nigerian literature from traditional to modern works. In addition, this work demonstrates that the artist is a victim of the fleeting space of in-betweenness in which his craft is formed and to which he owes allegiance. Rather than record the mores of a society, at most, society merely affords him a place through its language for the purpose of mediating ‘reality’ at a second remove. From the explorations of the above varied concerns, this work concludes that either the artist is a bad teacher, or is someone from whom the ability to teach or record his society’s mores breaks free.

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
 

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.

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.

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.

H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwinian perspective. The enduring appeal of his fiction testifies to his artistic intuition and imaginative understanding of evolution. However, Wells drew a sharp line between nature and culture, trusting culture to work against nature toward his ideal social state. From a modern evolutionary perspective, that split gave him an inadequate view of two important parts of human nature: imaginative culture and dispositions toward cooperative group behavior. In this article, I put Wells back on the Darwinian ground from which literary scholars have detached him. Taking The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau as examples, I use historical, biographical sources and modern evolutionary science to explain the psychological functions, imaginative effect and ambiguous canonical status of Wells’s early fiction.

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.

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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