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Poetry and narrative: an evolutionary perspective on the cognition of verbal art

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Abstract

The study of the aesthetic genres reveals important design features of cognition, in how complex higher-order abilities are organized mentally. An evolutionary perspective frames this research in a way that considers the componential nature of language-related abilities in particular. In addition, it directs our attention to the important problem of understanding how different abilities are related. In this review of the research the focus will be on poetic and narrative abilities: (1) as they develop in children, (2) how the component sub-structures of poetry and narrative might be represented cognitively, and (3) how they may have emerged in early humans. Crucially, the analysis of component structures implies understanding how they interact in performance, and more interestingly how different abilities and faculties share competence modules and processing mechanisms in common. This approach helps put the discussion regarding the relative weight of domain-specific and domain-general structures into perspective, potentially reconciling some seemingly opposing viewpoints in evolutionary science and in the study of language development.

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  1. Decisive empirical evidence for evolutionary foundations of music, poetry and other artistic genres is probably forever out of reach. But informed speculation on this problem has an important purpose. First of all, it is not likely that the capabilities in question emerged in a recent historical period, separated from the origin of language and the higher-order cognitive faculties by many thousands of years. Thus, theoretical coherence invites consideration of the different origin scenarios. For example, a hypothesis about the domain-specificity of a module specialized for a given competence should consider at least one plausible account of evolutionary emergence; two or three logical possibilities would be even better. If, say, all evolutionary possibilities that include natural selection as a mechanism can be discarded, the hypothesis for a domain-specific component should perhaps be reformulated. If no plausible evolutionary account of any kind can be proposed, and direct findings from archaeological and population genetics research disfavor it, the claim would appear to be severely weakened. Then lacking indirect neuropsychological and behavioral evidence in modern humans, alternative models that might account for the competence in question should be seriously examined.

  2. A prominent contemporary of the great Russian children’s poet, Vygotsky (1930/2004), also saw in young children’s impulse to deform and exaggerate their representations in play (with the greatest delight derived from the most outrageous excess) a necessary stage in the development of advanced artistic creation and scientific thinking.

  3. Kotthoff’s (2001) idea of the aesthetization of vocal expression of “basic expressions” is strikingly parallel to the ethnographic description by Cuban musicologist Alejo Carpentier (1953/1985) of ritual wailing and conjuration presented in his celebrated novel Los pasos perdidos [The lost steps]. The portrayal formed part of his discussion of the theory of a common origin of music and language in proto-linguistic/musical human vocalization (the same origin, we might speculate, is shared by poetry). The intense and deeply felt affective responses of grief and magical communion with the spirit of the moribund Amazonian hunter-gatherer, by the shaman on this occasion, laid recourse to the primal foundations of poetic discourse (in Los pasos perdidos, metaphorically, for the first time). “As well in Georgia, cries of grief and appeals to the deceased occur. They are spoken or sung, slowly falling intonation contours with integrated peaks, bowed bodily postures and an expressive lexicon” (Kotthoff 2001, p. 168). For the same ritual escenification, see Carpentier (1953/1985, pp. 182–229).

  4. See footnote 3.

  5. According to Navarrete Gómez (personal communication), itemization is a common rhetorical device used in a number of different public registers in the first language of the narrator (Nahuatl), and by bilinguals (in Spanish) in the region of Central Mexico where he lived. For discussion of traditional narrative styles, see Navarrete Gómez (2009).

  6. The difficult distinction between vernacular poetry and art poetry should be taken as roughly analogous to the difference between folk music and concert music, more widely accepted but similarly subject to overlaps and ill-defined boundaries. In this discussion, the former should be taken as poetry that is more likely to be integrated into everyday and culturally-specific discourses, typically not written and edited for publication, or deliberately composed as a separate creative activity to stand alone as a work by itself. Art poetry today is typically a composition that is edited for publication or formal performance, such as a reading. As opposed to integration into ritual or other exceptional language use context, it is more likely to be composed as part of a separate creative act by a professional writer or self-identified poet, resulting in the creation of a fixed text (oral or written).

  7. Functional, or functionalist, accounts of the evolution of language in archaic humans present arguments that are plausible and convincing. But the same arguments are not necessarily relevant in all respects to the problem of explaining language development in children. The latter is a research problem of ontogeny, the former a question about how the human language acquisition capacity came to form part of the biological endowment of our species. Victorri (2002) is an example where these research problems tend to be confounded.

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Francis, N. Poetry and narrative: an evolutionary perspective on the cognition of verbal art. Neohelicon 39, 267–294 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0148-7

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