What is it about?
Meaning occurs in minds of authors, readers, and characters. We need a shared common set of categories for discussing meaning. This article delineates a comprehensive set of motives grounded in evolutionary social science. Universal motivational patterns form a basis for comparison of different cultures and different individual identities. The article also describes meaning as the combined effect of thematic, emotional, and aesthetic effects. And finally it argues that producing and consuming fictional meanings have adaptive functions.
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Why is it important?
It makes an effort like that of Linnaeus. Without a comprehensive, common basis of comparison, literary interpretation will continue to proliferate in transient modes of description. Unlike previous efforts at a comprehensive analytic and interpretive system (Freudian, Marxist, Jungian, etc.), this system is solidly based in established contemporary evolutionary social science.
Perspectives
I've been working along these lines for the past 25 years or so. This particular article felt like a culmination, a higher level of integration than I had achieved before. It strikes me as tightly argued, dense, concentrated. There is also some new theoretical work integrating research on the brain's default mode network.
Joseph Carroll
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Minds and meaning in fictional narratives: An evolutionary perspective., Review of General Psychology, June 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/gpr0000104.
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