Sex, Death, and Fiction: Evolutionary Literary and Film Study

This course introduces students to the history and theory of evolutionary thinking in the humanities. The evolutionary human sciences are entering a mature phase, but have until recently operated on an inadequate understanding of "culture," and especially "imaginative culture": religion, ideology, myth, the arts, and intellectual life. That weakness is now being corrected by evolutionary thinking emerging from the humanities, as evolutionary approaches to literature and film are growing in importance and visibility.