ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
numbers three and eleven. “3. Because art appeals to our cognitive preferences for
patterns, it is self-motivating: we carry innate incentives to engage in artistic activity…11. We appreciate even minor variations within established forms as worth of
attention and response. With our senses highly tuned to basic patterns, we enjoy repetitions and variations on a theme in art as in play” (121-122). Patterns, rhythms, variations, syncopations.iv These are core tenets of the arts of poetry, fiction and music. I
will seek to tie these notions back to evolved tendencies in the brain and suggest new
avenues for reading literary works.
Such a wide-angle view, however, requires a wide lens in which to figure it. I am, in a
way, simply following Boyd’s earlier idea of ‘unnatural selection’. The fields of neuroscience and literary studies might seem unrelated, a problem further complicated by
the background philosophy and methodology of each. Hence the methodology and
backing will require some extra length for explication. Much of the difference between literary studies and neurosciences may be related to the recent dominance of
cultural studies in the humanities and their subsequent blurring of ‘facts’ as relative
forms of interpretation, kinds of discourse, mere apparatuses. This kind of modern
dualism update is found “(i)n current mainstream literary study, [where] dualism most
often takes the form of ‘cultural constructivism’ – the idea that culture has an autonomous causal force and is not constrained by innate dispositions” (Carroll, 2011: 65).
The line of thinking contends that if human action can only be described in language
and if language is culturally bound in its determinate meanings and social function,
then because all cultures differ in various degrees, there is no foundation from which
to begin speaking of an ineradicable ‘human nature’ because there is no vantage, no
“gods’ eyes view” (with apologies to Putnam) from which to begin to speak. To claim
that there is no truth is in fact a nugatory affirmation of a statement of truth, which
refutes itself (and remains a variation of the liar’s paradox).v Also, this line of thinking, that all cultures differ, that all art is subjective, that all language is slippery and
shifting, ignores an even deeper observation: the universal existence in the human
species of culture, sociability, language, art. Boyd says:
If cultural anthropology has shown that human nature is much more diverse than
any one society had assumed, evol