Since the 1950s, the cognitive revolution has been transforming work in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. Literary scholars, however, have only recently begun to grapple with the significance of cognitive understandings of language, mind, and behavior for literary and cultural studies. This unique issue of Poetics Today brings the concerns of literary history and cultural studies for the first time into a sustained and productive dialogue with cognitive methods, findings, and paradigms.The introduction situates the collection in relation to previous work, defines (...) the issues, highlights the stakes. Articles by Mark Turner and Paul Hernadi propose a bold extension of notions of literary history to include not only preliterature oral forms but the entire history of the species, viewing literary activity as a crucial human adaptation. Ellen Spolsky's essay provides an unprecedented statement of common ground shared by cognitive-evolutionary approaches and poststructuralist theory. The final three essays examine works by Aphra Behn, A. L. Barbauld, and Jane Austen in terms of their contemporary cultural and political contexts as well as in light of paradigms drawn from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary theory. A commentary by Tony Jackson surveys the entire issue from the viewpoint of an informed outsider. (shrink)

The subjective delight associated with the creative arts poses a well-known challenge to an integrated causal analysis of human psychology. Here we examine the distal causes of art in terms of an irreducibly risky search in a vast phase space of cognition and behavior. To explore means to engage in an activity that may result in a zero or negative payoff. Moreover, you may be unable to assess the risks with any certainty; the costs might spiral out of control. At (...) the same time, the known alternatives may simply not be viable; natural selection has no problems acting on the failure to locate new habitable subspaces. This represents the hard problem of evolution: there is no recurring procedure that will reliably deliver the benefits of a successful exploration. We propose to locate the emergence of play and art in the tension between the irreducible risks of exploration and its potential benefits and examine the complex suite of adaptations that has emerged to solve, however, imperfectly, the hard problem of evolution. This includes adaptations for lowering the cost of exploration and strategies for open-ended yet loosely targeted searches. We argue that the ability to become aware of possible actions, to evaluate their respective merits, and to explore and develop new strategies of perception, thinking, and action have had a major impact on human survival and reproduction and have been subject to persistent natural selection. The arts, we suggest, represent a distinct cognitive mode of pushing the boundaries of what is familiar and known into new areas of perceptual, emotional, and agentive exploration and discovery, characterized by a proximal motivation of intrinsic enjoyment. (shrink)