Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013

Literary studies need not always incorporate evolution but should always be at least compatible with the most powerful theory for explaining life. Evolution can open up new questions (like: why are we art-making, storytelling, versifying animals?), suggest new principles (like: always take into consideration the costs and benefits of creating or engaging in literary works), and offer new explanations of the life art represents and the effects it elicits (in sociality or emotion, say). These insights need not be restricted to human universals – evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary personality psychology investigate societal and individual differences – and can help explain at multiple levels, the global, the local, the individual, the work or the detail. Evolutionary considerations should not be required a priori but incorporated on a case-by-case basis, where they can almost always add explanatory depth.

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.

All literary Darwinists take inspiration from E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience--the idea that the disciplines are seamlessly interconnected, and that knowledge at higher levels of the explanatory hierarchy (e.g., biology and psychology) is constrained by knowledge at lower levels (e.g., chemistry and physics). For literary Darwinism’s founder, Joesph Carroll, committing to consilience means that literary investigation should always be tied back to the ultimate, evolutionary level of causation. In my own view, investigation in the humanities should be constrained, disciplined, and inspired by knowledge from the sciences, but I don’t think literary Darwinism is the only responsibly consilient approach to literary study.

Literary Darwinism is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that seeks to explain literature and its oral antecedents (“literary behaviors”), from a Darwinian perspective. Considered the fact that an evolutionary approach to human behavior has proven insightful, this is a promising endeavor. However, Literary Darwinism as it is commonly practiced, I argue, suffers from some shortcomings. First, while literary Darwinists only weigh adaptation against by-product as competing explanations of literary behaviors, other alternatives, such as constraint and exaptation, should be considered as well. I attempt to demonstrate their relevance by evaluating the evidentiary criteria commonly employed by Literary Darwinists. Second, Literary Darwinists usually acknowledge the role of culture in human behavior and make references to Dual Inheritance theory (i.e., the body of empirical and theoretical work demonstrating that human behavior is the outcome of both genetic and cultural inheritance). However, they often do not fully appreciate  the explanatory implications of dual inheritance. Literary Darwinism should be extended to include these recent refinements in our understanding of the evolution of human behavior.

The potential of literature to increase empathy was investigated in an experiment. Participants (N = 100, 69 women) completed a package of questionnaires that measured lifelong exposure to fiction and nonfiction, personality traits, and affective and cognitive empathy. They read either an essay or a short story that were equivalent in length and complexity, were tested again for cognitive and affective empathy, and were finally given a non-self-report measure of empathy. Participants who read a short story who were also low in Openness experienced significant increases in self-reported cognitive empathy (p .05). No increases in affective empathy were found. Participants who were frequent fiction-readers had higher scores on the non-self-report measure of empathy. Our results suggest a role for fictional literature in facilitating development of empathy.

A professor of English and an assistant professor of Education bring together humanistic textual analysis and descriptive empirical research to explore faculty perceptions and uses of the assignment they name the traditional literary critical essay and define as a critical essay that describes, analyzes or interprets a literary text(s) through close reading of the text(s)’s literary elements, such as theme, character, imagery, language, and metaphor. Through humanistic textual analysis, the authors demonstrate a consistent story of the prevalence of the traditional literary critical essay assignment in college literature classrooms in conjunction with negative assumptions about the purposes of the assignment, its political associations, and what influences faculty to use it. These historically situated issues were used to construct survey questions to explore faculty members’ perceptions of these assumptions. Carnegie institution ratings were used to sample faculty from colleges and universities across the United States. The survey was completed by 735 full-time faculty who teach literature courses. Survey findings support assumptions about the assignment’s prevalence but call into question several other assumptions in the historical narrative and point to the need for scientific study of pedagogical beliefs related to student writing in literature classes.

In two studies, indirect out-group contact via narrative fiction was shown to foster empathic growth and reduce prejudice. Participants read an excerpt from a fictional novel about a counterstereotypical Arab-Muslim woman. Individuals who were more transported into the story rated Arab-Muslims significantly lower in stereotypical negative traits (Study 1, N = 67) and exhibited significantly lower negative attitudes toward Arab-Muslims (Study 2, N = 102) post-reading than individuals who were less transported into the story. These effects persisted after controlling for baseline Arab-Muslim prejudice, reading-induced mood change, and demand characteristics. Affective empathy for Arab-Muslims and intrinsic motivation to reduce prejudice were also significantly increased by the story and each provided independent explanatory mechanisms for transportation’s association with prejudice reduction. Narrative fiction offers a safe and rich context in which exposure and understanding of an out-group can occur and can easily be incorporated in educational and applied settings.

Spoilers, despite their name, seem to increase enjoyment of stories. This could be because readers enjoy reading expected endings, because knowing the ending allows them to appreciate aesthetic elements instead of guessing what will happen, or because knowing the ending increases fluency by enabling readers to correctly interpret clues and events. We conducted three experiments to test these hypotheses. Experiment 1 collected ratings at the midpoints of anthologized stories, and determined that readers experience greater pleasure even before reading the end of spoiled stories. This spoiler benefit was mediated by processing fluency, and not by appreciation of aesthetic elements. Experiment 2 found that spoilers similar to those in Experiment 1 do not increase ease of reading — or pleasure — for very-easy-to-read stories. Experiment 3 found, however, that very simple spoilers could increase the pleasure of easy-to-read stories.

Students can readily engage in summary and literal sense-making when reading poems, short stories, and other literary texts, but are often unable to construct inferences and thematic interpretations of these works. This paper discusses the results of an instructional intervention built on an affect-based model of literary interpretation. Students in the intervention group spent four weeks reading and writing about popular and canonical texts, with a focus on poetry. As they read, they identified valence-laden language, made appraisals of valence, and then explained or justified their appraisals. Analyses of pre- and post-test results show that the intervention group made significant gains in the level of interpretive responses to poems compared to a control group of students who were not explicitly taught to engage in affective appraisal. This work sheds light on ways in which affect-based interpretive strategies can support novice readers’ interpretive practices.

Narratives are thought to evoke emotions through empathy, which is thought to rely on mentalizing. In this study young adults rated emotional intensity while listening to a narrative and took an empathy test. We show how empathy correlates well with overall level of experienced intensity. However, no correlation with empathy is found in the parts of the story that received highest intensity ratings across participants. Reverse correlation analysis reveals that these parts contain physical threat scenarios, while parts where empathy is correlated with intensity describe social interaction that can only be understood through mentalizing. This suggests that narratives evoke emotions, both based on “simple” physical contagion (affective empathy) and on complex mentalizing (affective theory of mind) and that these effects may be more or less independent.