Hello everyone.

Welcome to my informal research blog. This is a place where I can talk about readings I have done that do not necessarily have much to do with my applied linguistics research. As the blog title implies, I do like to read whenever I have the chance. I have other hobbies, too. This website is unofficially a record of sorts for various topics I encounter in the course of research. My hope is that something you see here may sate your curiosity.

I had meant to start this pursuit years ago, but like many good ideas, some other things got in the way and stole my time. However, the milk was spilled long ago and I won’t be shedding tears over it now.

Thanks for stopping by my website!

Robin

review:

Throughout my undergraduate university days, especially in my theatre and literature courses, discussions would often arise about a working definition of ‘art’. Most of those conversations could be distilled down to differences of aesthetic taste or individual perception. In my theatre courses that dealt with criticism, there were often long discussions, especially in our contemporary world, about how to define art and the role of the audience in signifying something as art. Rather than rise to this challenge of trying to define what art ‘is’ or ‘means’, Dutton takes an intriguing new angle and describes ‘art’ in terms of human evolution. Rather than seek to define art across cultures, he wishes to analyse how art has developed and functioned as a tool for human survival.

    My area of research is with theatre, and in his chapter The Uses of Fiction, Dutton makes what I regard as a simple but key observation when he remarks that imagining events and playing them out “without high-cost experimentation” would make for a valuable “adaptive power” (p. 106-107). As he goes on to discuss, this ‘imagining of events’ is something that human children do across all cultures. Contrary to adult perception, as we may be likely to forget as we age, children seem quite capable of keeping imaginary worlds separate from the ‘real world’, and can apply and abide by rules within these worlds just fine. Given its ubiquity throughout cultures, Dutton discusses this rise of play within human children as a likely evolutionary adaptation, summed up well in this extract:

“In terms of the larger picture of human history, one of the most significant steps in the evolution of the mind was the achievement of sophisticated counter-factual information processing: the ability of human beings to extend themselves by representing in their minds possible but nonexistent states of affairs-…” (p. 113)

   This touches on the previously mentioned ‘adaptive power’ and our ability, as human beings, to experience and experiment with scenarios, more than likely based to some extent on the reality we inhabit, and reason through solutions without facing real-life consequences. I have to admit this does make for a powerful evolutionary adaptation. As Dutton goes on to discuss, it is important to point out that these fictions we employ require us to understand the mind of another and that this ability “emerges spontaneously in children at around the age of two and is normally fully developed by the age of five” (p. 119). Moreover, as he states later on, the fact that this central tenet of child’s play, that of empathy, is absent in otherwise mentally normal autistic children is proof to the author that it is an innate, and not learned, ability.

   Dutton goes on to discuss fiction and storytelling further, but I will leave the book for now with a few closing remarks. While it is true that fiction, in the sense of theatre and storytelling, do not require language of any kind to make an emotional connection to an audience, it must be accepted that language allows for a vast array of counter-factual explorations given the facility of language to signify and describe things. One can invent a world with only their words, and if the speech is intelligible to the listener, then the listener can come along for the journey. This removes any physical need for representation or mimicry in the performance. In terms of what theatre, especially spoken performance, can facilitate with this potential, Dutton references the words of Steven Pinker when he reminds us that,

 “…it is easy but empty to observe that fiction, for instance, helps us to cope with the world, increases our capacity for cooperation, or comforts the sick, unless we can plausibly hypothesize that such coping or cooperation or comfort evolved as an adaptive function, conferring survival advantages in the ancestral environment.” (p. 109)

   So, it stands to reason that theatre, drama, the tales we tell and the legends we know, they all arose in our minds as a means of getting outside of the world around us in order to better survive in the world around us. The role that language plays seems key to this ability, given its expansive potential scope, and we would not have developed ability in language either if it too did not afford us a better chance at survival. You could say, in this vein of thought, that at a certain point in our history, children learned language in order to expand their empathetic ability and participate in these counter-factual experiences. That might be the ‘truth’ behind fiction.

BOOK INFORMATION

Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, & human evolution. Oxford University Press.

Life took me in some interesting directions after I first made this website 10 years ago. I have decided to update and refresh everything, in the process removing some of the old content. This was one of the old posts I kept, as it is important.

My Thesis:

Back in April 2015, my doctoral thesis was officially lodged in the library at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). It was a wonderful and honestly challenging 3.5 years of my life, but I was glad to have something like this dissertation to show for it. So, if anyone who actually reads this blog post is interested, here’s the link to my thesis:

http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10063/4165/thesis.pdf?sequence=2