The Literary Darwinists - статья в NYT про это новомодное течение: анализ мировой литературы с точки зрения эволюционной биологии/психологии. В популярной форме идея разработана в Madame Bovary's Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature, которую я брал б библиотеке, но толком даже не открыл по причине чтения другого всего подряд.

Cтатья "The Literary Darwinists" написана довольно скверно, в худшем God-like стиле NYT, но содержит довольно много интересной информации, в частности - про новый сборник статей The Literary Animal.

Несколько разрозненных цитат из статьи:

And Gottschall himself remains unemployed (though that is a condition familiar to many English Ph.D.'s).
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Consider how evolutionary psychology has displaced Freud. Who, upon discovering that a remote tribe had an incest taboo, would ascribe it to unconscious repression on the part of the sons of their sexual attraction to their mothers? Instead, we would likely cite an evolutionary biology principle that states that we have evolved an innate repulsion to inbreeding because it creates birth defects and birth defects are a barrier to survival.
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But what can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity?
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In "The Ghost Writer," Philip Roth's narrator informs another writer that "no one with seven books in New York City settles for" just one woman. "That's what you get for a couplet."

  ¶ 3:15 PM