Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form (Version 4) (original) (raw)
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The desire to understand and interpret the underlying mechanisms involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the influence of these mechanisms on human cognition goes back at least to Aristotle's Poetics. However, the last century has witnessed a vast variety of approaches to the understanding of literature: a plethora of theories such as feminist, post colonialist, queer and reader response theories as well as some practical ways of analysis and interpretation such as formalism, new criticism, stylistics, cognitive poetics have shown themselves at the opposite end of the continuum. Stylistics and its evolved form, cognitive poetics have been significantly influential in the understanding of the processes involved in the creation and reception of literature. Although stylistics and cognitive poetics have usually been covered under the broad heading of literary theory, it has been observed that the divergence in the ways they operate makes such claims invalid because, unlike theory, empirical evidence is at the heart of stylistics and cognitive poetics. This paper aims to provide an overview of stylistics, and cognitive poetics and illustrate how they differ from literary theory.
The object of neuroscience and literary studies
An investment in the object as unquestionably self-evident and self-defining has for quite some time now been widely critiqued as a central philosophical tenet of crony capitalism in its current economic, material, social, cultural and institutional manifestations. In this article, I trace that appeal to the category of the object in order to claim its discursive presence also in recent critical tendencies in literary criticism in relation to science, specifically evolutionary psychology and its underpinning neuro- and cognitive science. I focus my explorations through the 2010–2012 debate about ‘Literary Darwinism’ in the American journal Critical Inquiry and some selected articles from a 2008 special double-issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’, arguing that both illustrate typical, core issues and problems in the critical discourses about science and literature, specifically how both the literary criticism and the science that is drawn on to support it are nevertheless all made to be rooted in a world of an agreed liberal, political and ideological commitment to a subject assumed as an autonomous agent with a transparent consciousness and language to match.
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Scientific Study of Literature 3.1 (2013): 8-15.
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. "
Evolutionary proto-forms of literary behaviour
Christa Sütterlin, Wulf Schiefenhövel & Christian Lehmann, Johanna Forster & Gerhard Apfelauer (Hg.): Art as Behaviour. An Ethological Approach to Visual and Verbal Art, Music and Architecture, Oldenburg: BIS (Hanse-Studien 10), 2014
Despite a significant amount of works on cognitive poetics and narratology, a gap in the connection among experimental neuro-cognitive investigation, current explanatory theories in the scientific arena, and their applicability in the field of literary criticism still remains evident. In this paper, which is preliminary with respect to much wider-ranging research currently being carried out, we shall first of all attempt to identify some of the elements that consistently characterise diachronically examined literary fiction. The results of this analysis will be used to put together a model that identifies the initial drive to tell a story as being the transmission of a sense nucleus, rather than in the construction of a complex plot. Then some considerations will be offered on the possible biological-cognitive premises underpinning this tendency, which in their turn may be inserted into an interpretative framework that acknowledges the specific literary tradition in question. Finally, in the field of research into narrativity in literature, the interdisciplinary concept of style will be used to identify the most suitable one for connecting natural and cultural aspects.