This thesis is based on the premise that questions about human affairs, including questions about art, need to be considered in the context of our deep history as a species. Darwinian theories of human existence have given scholars in evolutionary psychology the chance to analyze human cognition, emotions, and behaviour by considering the trajectory of our evolution and how that has shaped our current situation. Taking a Darwinian literary approach, this thesis tries to answer one of the main questions about James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses: What is the purpose behind a style that many find so difficult in this novel? In order to answer this question, I explore the adaptive purposes of literature (in general) and stylistic experimentation (in particular). I argue that art can be seen as a form of sexual display where stylistic difficulty and originality are ways of indicating fitness for survival. In this way, both the author and readers of Ulysses spend their time and energy to produce and consume the difficult style of Ulysses because they find pleasure in an activity that is adaptively useful. Furthermore, I suggest that earning social status could have been an evolutionary motive for both the authors and readers of difficult modernist texts, including Ulysses. To support this, I show how gaining social status is part of other sexual ornamentation that handicap the displayer by imposing excessive difficulty in terms of the time and energy needed to put on those displays of fitness. / Graduate / 2018-10-23
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/8786 |
| Date | 06 November 2017 |
| Creators | Tagharobi, Kaveh |
| Contributors | Ross, Stephen |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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