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Saturday, December 12, 2009
Bérubé on Boyd’s Origin of Stories
Posted by Bill Benzon on 12/12/09 at 08:30 AM
Michael Bérubé has now reviewed Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. His review is online at American Scientist--yep, that’s right, “scientist.” Hope that doesn’t give you the heebie jeebies or the screamin’ meemies. He finds the first half, where Boyd lays out his psychological repertoire, to be “exhilarating,” but the second half, with its treatment of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, is disappointing. Discussions ongoing at Bérubé’s blog and at Crooked Timber.
My own review of Boyd is here.
I see a few references here and there in these links to the claim that Homer had no theory of mind, for which the given reference is Julian Jaynes’ Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes’s book has always struck me as trying to explain so much that it can hardly be either demonstrated or disproved and has most value as a source of new hypotheses—which is a rare and excellent thing for a book to be, but leaves me surprised when it is used to bolster another thesis.
Anyway. If I were looking to demonstrate from the literature that it is legitimate to assert Homer had no theory of mind, I would mention Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato and/or its companion, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, which generalizes the thesis.
And it’s been too long since I had a copy of either in my hand. Can someone tell me if they’ve been drawn into this discussion here or elsewhere? Or if Orality/Literacy studies have been exploded while I was not paying attention, so that the books above are now considered even *more* trippy and far-out than Julian Jaynes?
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