Character Study

By Arielle Seidman

As our class made its way through the term, our evolution as a class mirrored our own personal evolution, as well as the evolution of the stories we read. We began the year reading On The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, then moved into Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett, then Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, and finally, we finished the year with The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt. The books that would be used in a class specifically called “The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories” were chosen with great purpose. Each book mirrors a stage in biological evolution, and if we can create foils out of the books and the evolutionary stages, we can delve deeper into the meanings of these books.

Who You Love

Just as the oral version of telling stories has evolved over thousands of years since Homo sapiens came along, the invention of the alphabet and the development of written words have since evolved into written short stories and novels. Like the evolution of organisms, gradually, over thousands of years, human communication and the transmission of stories (and now knowledge) have continued to evolve.

“Who need be afraid of the merge?
Undrape… you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless… and can never be shaken away.” (Whitman 26)

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Throughout the history of literature, popular writings have helped to shape and form the structures and syntax of the modern languages that we know today.  Modern languages are constantly changing and evolving as a result of spoken or colloquial phrases being used in popular literature.  Through literature, these terms are spread and become familiar to the general population of speakers, and this can cause such drastic changes in the structure of a language that it may become unrecognizable after only a few centuries.  The two best and most dramatic examples of literature that has caused an evolution of the language in which it was written are the works of Shakespeare and Dante's Commedia.  Both Shakespeare and Dante, through their literature, dramatically changed the English and Itali