The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: EvoLit

In our small group today, we discussed justice and whether justice is impartial. Can we make accommodations for others while being just? Does justice require accommodations to be just? My first answer was that justice cannot make accommodations to be just, and in demanding that justice also be kind that we confused it with fairness or humanity. But then I decided to consult our favorite source, the OED. The OED online lists the meaning of justice as "The quality of being (morally) just or righteous; the principle of just dealing; the exhibition of this quality or principle in action; just conduct; integrity, rectitude."

 I was reading the latest issue of Psychology Today recently and came across an article about a man who haphazardly fell into ultramarathon running. For those of you who don't know, an ultramarathon is a race anywhere from about 30-100 miles long, and, yes, you run it. A podiatrist who ran two miles "to keep in shape" gradually found himself training for marathons and then graduated into runs lasting from 10 PM to 6 AM in preparation for hundred-mile races. 

Thursday’s conversation made me think in depth about inevitability. We talked about whether or not, with a greater understanding of science and medicine, the rats could have been exterminated before they infected the entire population. Even if the appropriate scientific measures had been taken, the people of Oran seem so enraptured by their monotonous lives that they most likely would not have reacted quickly enough to stop the spread.

Towards the beginning of the novel, when the plague first becomes prevalent in affecting the people, I noticed a relationship to what I had been learning in my psychology of time class. In this psych class we learned about temporal perspective, and how there are five different time directions: past negative, past positive, present hedonistic, present fatalistic, and future. Those people with a present hedonistic orientation tend to view life as living in the here and now and fail to think about the future, while present fatalistic people have a helpless and hopeless attitude toward life and the future. I found that when the people initially began dealing with the plague, temporal perspective played an important role.

In my section on Thursday we discussed whether we felt the characters in The Plague were more cartoon-ish than those in Generosity, or the reverse. Most of the class listed the characters in Generosity higher on this scale. I found myself doing the same thing, but now I wonder whether I really did get more of a glimpse into the emotions and reality of the characters in The Plague than in Generosity. I have come to the conclusion that I felt the reality of Camus' characters more-so because of his creation of the ordinary. The language he uses is such that even the most ghastly things can be happening in this town, and yet the characters continue on about their business in this strange, almost cold way.

At the end of our discussion on Thursday, our group briefly talked about the word “evil”. Several people said that they avoided using the word because it had religious connotations, and others said that they used it to describe instances when people acted without humanity. Someone (I believe OrganizedKhaos?) gave the example of a cannibalistic murderer as someone she would term evil. I think that in general, though, evil is a subjective term (the ick-factor of the cannibalism aside, which I think it's safe to say is unappealing to most people).

Last week, Professor Grobstein posed the question of whether "Generosity" represented the future of literature, something most of the class seemed to disagree with. Most people seemed to dislike "Generosity" because it was not a novel one could easily immerse oneself in, given the flatness of the characters, the fragmented narrative, and the intrusive metaliterary narrator, in other words any trait which rendered the novel anything other than stimulating entertainment to be passively consumed. I would argue that novels such as "Generosity" represent not the future but the past of the novel, a past in which literature was an art form that celebrated individual expression rather than a trade to be plied for the entertainment of the masses.

When PRofessor Dalke mentioned how many things from Paul Krugman's talk relate to our class, it got me thinking about how closely related Darwin's evolutionary theory and Adam Smith's economic theory are.  Smith and Darwin were both scientific writers with a flair for the prosaic.  And, in fact, they even have a tendency to share metaphors.  It's not really that surprising, really.  For example, Darwin's vision of finches evolving through natural selection to suit their environment is extremely similar to how Smith said businesses would mold themselves to a changing market in order to fulfill demand for a product, service, etc.  They even both come up with the same word to describe this phenomenon: niche.  What I like about this is that it und