Symposium on Aesthetics and Darwinism

Organized by the research group Cognition and Audiovisual Media at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication. There is no entry fee and signing-up in advance is unnecessary.

Moderator: Johannes Riis

Program

10.00 Introduction

10.15 Joseph Carroll: Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism

11.20 Break

11.35 Torben Grodal: HTTOFF-scenarios, Tribalism and Humor: Evolutionary and biological roots of film entertainment

12.40 Break

13.45 Murray Smith: Prospects and Problems for a Third Culture

14.50 Closing remarks

Abstracts

Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism

Joseph Carroll, professor at University of Missouri

I envision three alternative scenarios for literary study: one in which literary Darwinism remains outside the mainstream of literary study; one in which literary Darwinism is incorporated as just another of many different “approaches” to literature; and a third in which the evolutionary human sciences fundamentally transform and subsume all literary study. I locate current practices in a historical trajectory going back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Traditional literary humanism governed literary study until the poststructuralist revolution in the 1980s. Poststructuralism has isolated literary study from the production of knowledge and has adopted instead an ideological rationale for the profession. Repetition, exhaustion, and superficial variation are already now chronic conditions. The literary Darwinists, seeking to integrate literary study with the evolutionary human sciences, occupy a marginal role. In the first scenario, all this would remain stable. In the second scenario, literary Darwinism would be part of a “pluralist” vision in which incomplete and incompatible interpretive practices join together in casebooks. In the third scenario, the poststructuralist literary establishment crumbles quietly from within, succumbing to intellectual dry rot, and literary Darwinism attains to full maturity by absorbing the most comprehensive ideas in the evolutionary human sciences and integrating them with ideas specific to literary study. A mature literary Darwinism would be part of a transformed curriculum in which the evolutionary human sciences fully integrate the social sciences, linking them with evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and cognitive and affective neuroscience. The humanities would be continuous, both in concepts and in methods, with the evolutionary human sciences.

HTTOFF-scenarios, Tribalism and Humor: Evolutionary  and biological roots of film entertainment

Torben Grodal, Professor emeritus at University of Copenhagen

I will first briefly discuss advantages and limits of using evolutionary theories on film and the evolutionary roots of central elements in film entertainment. More specifically, I will argue that central parts of exciting film entertainment are based on HTTOFF-scenarios (Hiding, Tracking, Trapping/being Trapped, Observing, Fleeing and Fighting), using mostly anger and fear as emotional fuel. These are scenarios that any mammal would be able to experience. Also, I will discuss how scenarios, which are central to bonding-themed entertainment may be integrated with HTTOFF scenarios. Finally, I will discuss how humans’ adaptations to tribal life influence the way in which we may bond with a group of film characters. At the heart of empathy are neural mechanisms, which support in-group activity and relationships. This tribal bias may in turn shed light on an age-old problem: Is humor evil or does it express empathy?

Prospects and Problems for a Third Culture

Murray Smith, professor at University of Kent

Fifty years ago, physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented what he saw as a debilitating and widening gulf between the culture of science and the culture of literature and the arts, in his well-known essay on the ‘two cultures.’ F.R Leavis, the most influential academic literary critic of the day, treated Snow’s argument with barely-veiled contempt. Are we still caught in this impasse? Have the two cultures learned to speak to one another? Have we seen the emergence of something like a ‘third’ culture, integrating the natural and social sciences with the arts and the humanities? Is such a culture a straightforwardly desirable outcome?

Here I argue that dialogue between the humanities and the sciences – genuine interdisciplinarity – is indeed desirable, but that it faces many difficulties and is often misconceived. In particular, a ‘third culture’ which simply treats the humanities as subservient to the sciences, or which seeks to reduce the value of the arts and humanities to quantifiable economic and social value, both omit the crucial and distinctive contribution that an education in the humanities can bring.  A third culture worth having will be one in which humanists are confident of their own distinctive and irreducible contributions, while remaining open to the knowledge and methods of the sciences. In working through these issues, I explore research on the emotions and on mirror neurons, considering both the importance of philosophical reflection within and on this research, and the significance of such research for our understanding of the arts in general, and the art of film in particular.

Read about the Cognition and Audiovisual Media research group.