Narrative...

History, biography, and fiction are the queens of the humanities because we think via narrative. I give a lecture on this stuff occasionally, and I am anxious to improve it and keep it up to date...

Narrative https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0vo61T4rToRXKzWceow8gi0-g
A Story of American Economic History

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/01/the-story-of-american-economic-history.html
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0d5I-zcl-0Y3NC6EKy9VkAWAg

html http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/05/narrative.html




David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories
William Flesch: Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
Joseph Carroll, Jona Than Gottschall, John Johnson, and Daniel Kruger: Paleolithic Politics in British Novels of the Longer Nineteenth Century
Brian Boyd: On the Origin of Stories

David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories: "The perfect summer blockbuster. A handsome king... superhuman strength... insufferable arrogance... wreak[s] havoc...

...Enter a down-to-earth wayfarer who challenges him to fight. The king ends the battle chastened, and the two heroes become fast friends and embark on a series of dangerous quests across the kingdom.... It is the Epic of Gilgamesh, engraved on ancient Babylonian tablets 4,000 years ago... read and enjoyed today, and that so many of its basic elements���including its heart-warming ���bromance������can be found in so many of the popular stories that have come since. Such common features are now a primary interest of scholars specialising in ���literary Darwinism���....

The cave paintings in sites like Chauvet and Lascaux in France from 30,000 years ago appear to depict dramatic scenes that were probably accompanied by oral storytelling. ���If you look across the cave, there will be a swathe of different images and there often seems to be a narration relating to a hunting expedition,��� says Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan.... The average adult is still thought to spend at least 6% of the waking day engrossed in fictional stories.... Storytelling is a form of cognitive play that hones our minds, allowing us to simulate the world around us and imagine different strategies, particularly in social situations. ���It teaches us about other people and it���s a practice in empathy and theory of mind,��� says Joseph Carroll.... Providing some evidence for this theory, brain scans have shown that reading or hearing stories activates various areas of the cortex that are known to be involved in social and emotional processing, and the more people read fiction, the easier they find it to empathise with other people...

#shouldread
#lecture