Seminar 12: Brian Boyd: The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature

 

Friday 13 July 2007 4.00pm-5.00pm (please arrive in good time)

Lecture Theatre 18
Building EA
Parramatta Campus
University of Western Sydney

Admission is Free but Bookings are Essential

The Writing and Society Group at the University of Western Sydney and the Department of English at Macquarie University in association with the ‘Literature and Sensation’ conference of the Australasian Association for Literature present:

Brian Boyd: The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature

Speaker:
Brian Boyd (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Convenor:
Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)

Convenor's Introduction

Literature thrives but literary studies languish and lament. How can an awareness of science—especially of evolutionary and cognitive psychology—return us to the art of literature, and what can literature offer science? In describing a biocultural perspective I will seek to address some of these questions in this paper.

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak.

Over the last couple of decades biology has discovered culture—knowledge transmitted nongenetically and subject to innovation and fashion—in birds, whales and dolphins, and among primates other than ourselves, at least in chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. Without our own species’ special biology, culture could not be as important to us as it is.

In all species, from bacteria up, communication within the species is possible because of shared senses and interests. In the human case, we can understand one another, even across cultures, because of a range of intraspecies similarities. And we can understand one another especially well because humans are geared to learn from one another through joint attention, the expressiveness of the human facial musculature, the precision of human pointing (all of which develop before language, and make it possible), and language. Our capacity for social learning, for acquiring our own culture, also makes it possible to appreciate and enjoy the culture of others.
A biocultural perspective on the human offers the strongest possible reasons to take into account artistic accomplishment in all areas and cultures, and the strongest reasons for considering local difference in terms of a genuinely broad understanding of species-wide commonalities and differences. It is the least likely to fix on an artistic canon within a particular language or region, a particular cultural level (“high” art versus “low,” say), a particular state of civilization. In a biocultural view, the Paleolithic and the present, the hunter-gatherer and the cosmopolitan, orature and opera are all part of our human repertoire.

In developing a biocultural approach here I will take as my main example Nabokov’s Lolita, whichcaused and still causes a sensation—and a complex range of sensations.
(Brian Boyd, Professor of English at the University of Auckland, is author of the definitivetwo volume biography on Vladimir Nabokov among many other works)

For campus location, transport information and campus map, see:
www.uws.edu.au/about/locations/maps/parramattamap