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Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate what we know, or can hope to find out, about the anthropological substrates of poetic behaviors and to make explicit some of the tacit assumptions that always accompany historical studies in literature in the form of more or less commonsensical presuppositions. As verbal art depends on the human faculty for speech and language, the analysis will take its starting point with the evolution of language. Present-day knowledge about the evolution of language or, more broadly, communication within the primate family casts doubt on the idea that literature, or verbal art, is one and the same thing in the sense of a “natural kind.” Like language, it might rather be a heterogeneous phenomenon from multiple origins, homogenized conceptually only on the cultural level. In this sense, this chapter typifies the prosodic (or “lyric”), the referential (or “narrative”), and the performative (or “dramatic”) dispositions as three different phylogenetic origins (among others perhaps) of verbal art. The shorter second part of this chapter will be concerned with methodological questions, such as stating literary universals or reasoning about the “adaptive value” of a trait.