Search Results
The program of an empirical anthropology of literature places literature within the network of conditions and functions that make it possible or even enforce it. "Empirical" is not meant to limit the spectrum to those procedures of controlled observations that are common in the empirical human sciences. But it is meant to indicate the need for the categories used to be, at any rate, consilient with intersubjectively communicable experience. "Anthropology" means the whole context of the human literary activity: both psychological and social factors to be correlated with literature. This results in a strong interdisciplinary emphasis, extending to the natural sciences, especially biological anthropology, human ethology, and evolutionary psychology. The anthropologically oriented analysis of proto-poetic forms and poetogenic structures investigates the biological dispositions on which they rest; the social-historical analysis investigates the cultural factors that determine the concrete historical manifestations of human artistic behavior. The books in this series need not be exclusively literary studies and by literary scholars; rather, the series is intended to be open to all undertakings that examine literature and art in interplay with their biological and/or cultural contexts, thus transcending the boundaries of mere immanence of discourse.