Humanities and the World:

an Evolving Hope

First Indian

Renaissance

Gupta Empire 320 - 550 ce

Classical India 400 - 1200

Noble Women Poets

in Classical India

AH, STEAMY HOPE!

• Arts & Humanties: AH!

• Arts & Humanties in Action: AHA!

• Half-Assed Humanities & Arts: HA-HA!

• STEM: Science Technology Engineering & Math

• STEAM: Science Technology Engineering Art & Math

• HOPE: Humanities Opens People’s Eyes

Scientific and Logical Challenges to Critical Theory

• 1996 the Sokal Affair : physicist and liberal publishes “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in Social Text

• 2018 “Sokal Squared”: three academic malcontents fake seven scholarly articles accepted for publication (including one that made the “best of 25 years” for that journal)

• Ethical problems with these hoaxes

• Intellectual problems with Confirmation Bias

3 Pervasive Theoretical Metaphors this last decade

• Entering the Conversation

– Is there a point? Is the conversation going anywhere?

• Trying out a Theoretical Lens

– Is the lens apt for the purpose? Do we need corrective lenses?

• Performance

– What about actual practice? Are better performances possible? – Essays are attempts. Process and product intertwining…

Plays are Drishya-Kavya “visual poems”combining actors, dancers, dialogue, poems, music, mime

for a “total performance”

Dance (Natya) & Mime

Classical Indian Dance Shiva Nata-Raj

Lord of the Dance

Individual Performancelevels of performance

EyesFacial expressionGesturesPostureBody Language

CosmeticsOrnamentsCostume

Gestures (Mudra)handbook of performance

Rasa

• Mood or emotional essence of literature

• Virtual experience of a basic human emotion• Evoked by signs & symptoms that

simulate or stimulate emotion

• Must be sensitive & open to perceive rasa• Makes a receptive audience

yet more sensitive & perceptive: rasa “makes the heart grow”

Aesthetic experience & Human emotion

Rasa Aesthetic mood Sthayibhava Emotion

• Shringara Romantic rati desire

• Karuna Tragic shoka grief

• Vira Heroic adventure utsaha energy

• Raudra Thriller krodha anger

• Bhayanaka Horrific bhaya fear

• Bibhatsa Gross jugupsa disgust

• Hasya Comic hasa laughter

• Adbhuta Marvelous vismaya wonder

• [Shanta Peaceful nirveda/shanti nonknowing/peace]

7 Basic Emotions and their Universal Expressions

(Masumoto & Hwang 2011)

human faces and emotion“minimal universality”

Schechner 2002“Levels of Performance”

positioning features of the face

--gets interpreted consistently as definite emotions

--produces the emotions in the “actor” (i.e. triggers neurochemical response)

Human Nature?

• Intellectuals in the Humanities in the past few centuries assertedone, unchanging, core human nature.

– problems: limited data set, mainly based on UC straight white males

• Intellectuals in the Humanities in the past few decades denied any universal human nature.

– problems: Isn’t science universal? human rights for all?

• Current science has more to offer the Humanities:

• Human nature has an evolutionary history. We inherit a common human nature (biological, genetic, cognitive), but it responds to its environment and develops (flexible & adaptive; no biological determinism).

– problems? to be seen…

Cognitive/Neuro Science

Stanislas Dehaene

• 1997 The Number Sense

• 2009 Reading in the Brain

• 2014 Consciousness &

the Brain

• “Lacan said the unconscious is structured like a language.

It isn’t.”

SumerianAkkadian

PhoenicianOld HebrewOld Greek

Egyptian

5000 years of written texts:recordshistoriesliterature

Scripts developed independently around the world

Chinese Indian Mayan

Recognition of letters

a more complex, but more accurate,

view fromReading in the Brain

(Dehaene 2009)

Cognitive Poetics

• brings to bear recent findings on cognition and perception to inform all readings

• attends to how subjectivity, feeling, perception are representedin literature

• analyzes the cognitive processes made evident in the reader’s decoding of the text

• aims to give a cognitive account of aesthetics, artistic experience, and literary creativity

Linguistics

Core Linguistics

• Human have an innate ability to acquire language. Children around the world acquire language at the same age (9 – 40 months). The brain must have innate structures and capabilities to do so. This neuroanatomy is biological and genetically inherited.

• Languages are structured. Those structures operate according to well-defined rules which can be discovered and understood clearly.

• The grammar (phonology, syntax, etc.) of any language have nothing to do with the culture or its social codes. The grammatical order and social order are not two parts of one Symbolic Order.

• Yet, the number of utterances (specific performances of language) is open-ended.

Some of what Linguistics offers

Language Learninge.g., Sanskrit

Language Preservatione.g., Chukchansi

Ecology

Ecocriticism US / Green Studies UK

• focus on nature writing & the representation of nature in literature

• vs. linguistic / social constructionism & treating world as text

• investigate human nature, our relation to the natural environment, & nature beyond the human

• focus on concepts / values like observation, process, relation, responsibility, sustainability, symbiosis

Evolution

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

• draws on evolutionary psychology for its understanding of human nature

• reads texts for biological themes and conflicts

• focuses on textual appeals to evolutionary impulses

• seeks to explain how and why literature & other arts evolved

• literature can provide counter-examples that call into question the scientific understanding of human evolution

Biopoetics

to think/feel, read, and respond

as whole persons (body & brain—“minus the pain”)

in an evolutionary, ecological setting

• How does that impact the way poems and stories are created and the reasons we tell stories and perform poems?

• How and why do poems and stories affect audiences?

Vijjaka / Vidya c. 730 CE

“Sage”• South India: Karnataka• Noble woman at court

• Kama (pleasure, desire) over Dharma (duty)

• Sarasvati / “Flow” • goddess / Devi of learning and poetry

not the ancient Vidya, but Vidya Shah, a modern singer

Genre: Muktaka-Kavya

“liberated insight” or “free poetry”

• Dhvani: “Resonance” or “Suggestion”

– a poetic style or way of hinting at a meaning

– beyond denotation or basic literal meaning

– beyond one-step inference (e.g., sun always implies light)

– to indirect suggestions, networks of associations

– forging subtle, evocative links

Vijjaka “Liberated Poem” #105.

Hey, neighbor woman, will you keep an eye on our house

a moment?

The child's father finds the water of our well

tasteless.

So, alone, I'm going to that choice spot by the river, behind the

trees' cover.

They may scratch my breasts, those dense reeds with their

hard stems.

Monsoon / “Rainy Season”the season of love

nature flourishing; people indoors / outdoors

Down by the Riverthe place of love

cool, refreshing, screened from view

Vijjaka “Liberated Poem” # 107. [Murala River]

Your bottom, sandy,dense shadows dangling

from curvy edges.Cool breaths of wind

lay bare a spotof tinkling water-beads.

She, free of restraint,loves ceaselessly,gives, refreshes, changes.

Do tell, Murala,who clothed you in

screening reeds and trees?

Love in the wild and at court

Vijjaka “Liberated Poem” #108.

After making love up on a platform in a cucumber field, her thin body

squeezed, tiny hairs thrilling, fused in her lover’s limbs

both arms clasped in sheer delight around his neck,

to ward off howling jackals, this hick girl uses her foot now and then

to make a tinkling racket, swinging a shell necklace, hanging

on a vine from the fence topto jangle into the night.

What Humanities has to offer the Sciences:

• Asking Questions & Setting Challenges

• Providing Data

• Negotiating: – making Sense of scientific findings

– accounting for or recounting it

• Translating and Communicating

HOPE

• Humanities Open People’s Eyes

• How to Optimize Performances Everywhere

more recent PsychologyCognitive Science

• 2006 Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, eds. (19 essays)

The New Unconscious

• 2012 Mlodinow. Subliminal:

how your unconscious mind rules your behavior

• 2014 Dehaene. Consciousness and the Brain

• 2017 Sapolsky. Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst

more recent Linguistics

• 1994 Pinker, S. The Language Instinct

• 1999 Bauer & Trudgill, eds. Language Myths

• 2010 Crystal, D. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd Ed.

• 2011 McWhorter, J. What Language Is

Readings in Ecocriticism

• 1995 Buell, L. The Environmental Imagination• 2005 -- The Future of Environmental Criticism

• 1996 Glotfelty & Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader

• 2000 Coupe, L. The Green Studies Reader

• 2004 Garrad, G. Ecocriticism: an Introduction

• 2008 Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Readings in Evo-criticism

• 2005 Gottschall, J., ed. The Literary Animal (essays)

• 2009 Boyd, B. On the Origin of Stories

• 2010 Boyd, Carroll & Gottschall, eds.

Evolution, Literature & Film: a Reader

• 2011 Gottschall, J. The Storytelling Animal