Surviving Through Stories: The Evolutionary Foundations of Literature

Joseph Carroll

Curator's Professor of English at the University of Missouri

Dr. Stephen Balch, Director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, interviews special guest Dr. Joseph Carroll, Curator's Professor of English at the University of Missouri. Carroll argues that our evolutionary past entwines itself into all our stories, making human meaning out of biological rhythms and relationships. Individual people construct internal narratives about their own lives, and thus define their identities, values, and goals. According to Carroll, every society tells a collective story about itself: its origins, its virtues, and its purposes. Drawing on recent research in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities, Carroll delineates the human life cycle and describes the universal literary themes that emerge from that cycle. He also explains how every individual culture and person modulates the universal themes of human nature. This "biocultural" view of imagination opens a path to new forms of literary study, and it suggests a vast, humanistic expansion in the concept of human nature.