Why Is Literature
A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375805 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul Hernadi (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 21-42 |
| Publication date | 2002-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-23-1-21 |
| OpenAlex | W1989934009 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 26 |
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 cooperators 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 coevolution of human nature and cultures helps explain its worldwide presence and perhaps even some of its shared characteristics across cultural divides. Three features respectively associated with the cognitive, emotive, and volitional dimensions of mental functioning appear to be universal and will be discussed in detail: (a) the verbalizing of semantic and episodic memory and of ego-centric and participatory orientation 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
Aesthetics · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Emotive · Entertainment · Epistemology · Feeling · Linguistics · Narrative · Psyche · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropology · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Scientific Literary Criticism in the Work of Matthew Arnold and William Dilthey
Who Cares
Literature
Fictional Feeling
Consciousness and Ian McEwan's Saturday
Fostering Self-Awareness and Self-Love for Mindset Transformation and Personal Growth
On Cognition, Interpretation, and the Survival of Literature
Cognitive Literary Historicism
Storytelling without telling
Introduction
Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I)
The Child's Theory of Mind
What Emotions Really Are
Anatomy of Criticism
Pretending and believing
The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations
On The Language Instinct
Natural Theories of Mind
The Evolution of human behavior
The Modularity of Mind
Critique of Judgment
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Language and Species
Art as Experience (1934)
Mapping the Mind
The social construction of reality
Basic emotions, rationality, and folk theory
Evolution and literary theory
Literature and Evolution
Story and Situation
Dreaming as psychosis
Ways of Worldmaking
Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,48 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2024 (22) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |