Animal Metaphors and Metaphorizing Animals: An Integrated Literary, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Analysis of Making and Partaking of Stories

Abstract

Humans use metaphors to explore their relationship with nature. Our ability to make and understand metaphors appears to be an automatic cognitive process, one that likely evolved along with our ability to create and understand language. Because metaphors are processed automatically, without conscious appraisal, they can be used to rapidly communicate, or manipulate. Applying theories of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to literary texts, we explored the role of animal metaphors in the making and partaking of stories in the context of a course in environmental studies. We investigated how humans are animals and yet use culture to shield themselves from this reality. We read and analyzed literature in which animal metaphors are central, such as Honoré de Balzac's short story Passion in the Desert and Langdon Smith's poem "Evolution." Throughout the course, the overarching theme is that animal metaphors are powerful tools for framing our relationship with the environment and that they can be best understood in the context of humans as evolved animals.Keywords Metaphor . Narrative . Literature . Blended space . Human universals . Theory of mind . Animate monitoring system How do we distinguish humans from animals? This question, meant to provoke discussion, was put to students on the first day of "Animal Metaphors," an intermediatelevel course designed for the multidisciplinary environmental studies major at Vassar College. Team-taught by a specialist of French literature and a scientist whose dual specialization is biology and cognitive science, the course draws on concepts from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to reframe questions of human-animal identity encountered in imaginative literature as well as everyday life. To permit the exchange of information and ideas between students of varied backgrounds in the humanities or natural sciences, we developed a conceptual bridge using analytic approaches from cognitive science and literary studies. That bridge is "animal metaphors."In this paper, we discuss the structure of the course, metaphor and the evolved process of understanding metaphors, the conceptual tools needed to analyze metaphors critically in their textual and evolutionary contexts, and examples of how those conceptual tools were applied to the analysis of texts. Overview of the CourseThough a common term in literary studies, we intend animal metaphors to represent our particular approach to evolutionary studies. We begin with the premise that humans are animals, primates that share physical, behavioral, and neural machinery with other primate species. Humans have the cognitive ability to make and understand metaphors, and they create animal metaphors in order to cognitively model and represent other agents, including other humans, in our ongoing struggle for existence in a rapidly changing environment. Paradoxically, the evolved use of animal metaphors to fashion a relationship with the environment allows humans to conceptualize themselves as non-animals. As metaphorically const...

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