Darwinian literary study
Literary Darwinists use concepts from evolutionary biology and the evolutionary human sciences to formulate principles of literary theory and interpret literary texts. They investigate interactions between human nature and the forms of cultural imagination, including literature and its oral antecedents. By “human nature,” they mean a pan-human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition.
They believe that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment. They argue that for humans, as for all other species, evolution has shaped the anatomical, physiological, and neurological characteristics of the species, and they think that human behavior, feeling, and thought are fundamentally shaped by those characteristics.
Evolutionary literary criticism of identifying basic, common human needs—survival, sex, and status, for instance—and using those categories to describe the behavior of characters depicted in literary texts. Starting from the premise that the human mind has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment, literary Darwinists undertake to characterize the phenomenal qualities of a literary work (tone, style, theme, and formal organization), locate the work in a cultural context, explain that cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions (including cultural traditions), describe the socio-cultural, political, and psychological functions the work fulfills, and locate those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature.
Your assignment is to create a Darwinian Literature Review on your favorite book (or movie), approaching it from an Evolutionary Psychology viewpoint. The point here is to try to identify as many evolutionary adaptations/behaviors/ideas that you see working in the characters, plot lines, etc. in the story.