Why Is Literature:
Some Co-Evolutionary Implications
of Imaginative Worldmaking
A Presentation by Paul Hernadi
Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
UCSB
Friday April 9, 1999 at 12:30pm - 2:00pm
Anthropology, HSSB 2001A
Abstract
Since prehistoric times, literature has been serving two complementary
functions: to expand the cognitive, emotive, and volitional horizons
of human awareness and to integrate our beliefs, feelings, and desires
within the fluid mentality required for survival in the complex social
environments of human organisms. Frequent participation in protoliterary
transactions may have made some early humans more astute planners, more
sensitive mind-readers, and more reliable co-operators than their conspecific
rivals, thereby increasing their chances to become the ancestors of contemporary
men and women. Such a view of literature's role in the co-evolution
of human nature and culture helps to explain its worldwide presence and
perhaps even some of its shared characteristics across cultural divides.
Three universal features, respectively associated with the cognitive, emotive,
and volitional dimensions of mental functioning, will be discussed in detail:
(a) the verbalizing of semantic and episodic memory and of egocentric and
participatory perception through thematic, narrative, lyric, and dramatic
modes of discourse; (b) the polarization of literary entertainment
into thrilling and gratifying types inclining audiences toward recognizable
subvarieties of either crying or laughing; and (c) the motivating
impact of fictive stories about imagined characters on the will of actual
people to change themselves and their worlds.
Paul Hernadi
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCSB. Of the
books he has authored or edited, the following have bearing on the forthcoming
presentation: Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification
(1972), What Is Literature? (1978), What Is Criticism? (1981),
Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage (1985),
Cultural Transactions: Nature, Self, Society (1995).
Personal web page: http:/humanitas.ucsb.edu/~hernadip/
Top of page
