LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

I recently read Bradley Irish’s overview of debates concerning universality in emotions. Irish’s treatment of the subject is careful, scholarly, and well-argued. However, there are necessarily some points that he could not develop adequately in a short overview of such a large body of work. Perhaps the most consequential of these concerns the ways in which the type of theory one adopts has consequences for what counts as a universal. For example, he quotes a number of linguists to the effect that “the idea of a single underlying linguistic system different only in surface realization seems increasingly unlikely” (Majid 432). Majid is here alluding to Noam Chomsky’s view of universality. One of the linguists Irish quotes as representing this “general challenge to universalism” is Stephen Levinson (from a co-authored work; see Evans and Levinson), despite the fact that Levinson is no enemy of universalism, as is shown by his (excellent)  2025 book, The Interaction Engine, which puts forth a range of universals (admittedly, very different from Chomsky’s). I do not advocate a Chomskyan account of language or of universals. Even so, I believe that both Majid and Levinson are mistaken in their contention that Chomsky-type universalism has been (almost) disproven. I say this primarily because of the way universality, as well as evidence and counter-evidence bearing on universalism, are defined in a Chomskyan or similar theory. In order to clarify some of what is at stake in different types of theories of universals, I will go through two illustrative cases—Chomsky and Joseph  Greenberg, who articulate very different types of universalistic theory.

Theories and Evidence

Unlike many authors outside of the field, linguists are aware that there are different types of universalistic theory about language. They know, for example, that Joseph Greenberg and Noam Chomsky articulated such theories and they were very different from one another. But it is often unclear that even linguists fully understand the exact nature and consequences of such differences. For example, all universalists acknowledge that candidates for universals might have apparent exceptions. How significant the exceptions are, however, is not self-evident. It is a function of the theoretical premises underlying one’s research program. For example, neither Majid’s nor Levinson’s comments, as quoted in Irish, has clear consequences for either a Chomskyan or Greenbergian universalist program in linguistics.

To most readers, it may seem that the case is straightforward: Universalists predict that all languages have property p and are falsified by even a single language that lacks this property. But, despite the popularity of (this popularization of) Popperian falsificationism, that would be very bad science, for two reasons. First, any theory that deals with statistical likelihood does not support falsification by a single disconfirming instance. (As Nigel Fabb reminded me, in some cases, this situation may occur because a language develops in such a way that two generally valid universals cannot both be instantiated in the language; in other words, the application of one universal principle may sometimes interfere with the application of another.) Second, any statistically significant deviation from random distribution requires explanation and is likely to prove relevant for understanding the field in which it occurs. For example, there is a “cross-linguistic preference for suffixing over prefixing” (Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre), such that test subjects “learning an artificial language with suffixes identifying word categories outperformed those learning a language with prefixes.” This is not rendered irrelevant to an account of language structure and language acquisition simply because there are languages with prefixes (though of course the account of language structure and acquisition will, in all likelihood, be different than it would have been if there were no languages of the latter sort).

We could just as easily use a universal posited by Levinson, such as regular turn taking, with a limited amount of time (as little as 200 milliseconds) between turns, indicating the extreme rapidity of the transition and thus the refined sensitivity we have to signals of turn ending (see Levinson 34-45). If we happened to find a language in which this is not the case—in which, say, any given speaker could speak as long as he or she wished, without particular justification—that would hardly render the overwhelming predominance of turn taking irrelevant to the study of language. Or consider the metaphorical mapping of time onto space (specifically, the subject-centered version of space, which is handled by parietal cortex, rather than hippocampal, objective spatial relations [see Clark, Boutros, and Mendez 43]). This yields such metaphors as “A bright future is before us,” or “Our best days are behind us.” Languages often stress a mapping which links the future with what is in front of us and the past with what is behind us. It caused a great kerfuffle a few years back when linguists noted that Aymara (a South American, First Nations’ language) apparently reverses this—as does English, when we say that “old age is creeping up on me” or, following Marvell, “at my back, I always hear,/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” (“To His Coy Mistress,” ll.21-22). But even without the English parallels, the existence of the apparently less common pattern in Aymara hardly means there is nothing significant about the evidently more common pattern.

The Greenbergian tradition in linguistic universalism treats this issue straightforwardly. (For a fuller discussion of these points, see Comrie.) Some phenomena are statistical, while others appear to be more absolute in their conformity to laws (i.e., they exhibit more uniform behavior)—not only in linguistics, but in every field where one might seek universals (such as literature). In consequence, Greenbergians distinguish absolute from statisticaluniversals. Moreover, some patterns occur only in contexts where other patterns occur. These are implicationaluniversals. An example of an implicational universal is as follows: If a language has verb-subject-object word order, then it has prepositions, as opposed to postpositions (see Comrie 17; note that implicational universals may themselves be absolute or statistical). When a number of implicational universals cluster together, you have typological universals. Claims regarding all of these types of universals are in principle subject to a statistical significance test. Thus, they are as falsifiable—or at least as open to rational discussion, thus logical and empirical criticism and defense—just as claims are elsewhere in the social and biological sciences.

Chomsky’s approach to universals partially overlaps with that of Greenberg in that he in effect makes use of the idea of implicational universals. But he does so in such a radically different context as to give even those points of overlap a very different significance or function in the overall, theoretical system. Since Chomsky developed numerous theories in the course of his career, I will focus on one–the “Principles and Parameters” (P&P) framework–both because I find it particularly appealing and because it is adaptable to different specific theories, at least to the extent of illustrating the problems with a “simple falsificationist” view of universals. First of all, Chomskyan universals—in the sense of universals that enter into his theories–are absolute. Moreover, this is because they form the core of every language and variation in languages is confined to the periphery (as suggested in the quote from Majid). However, that core and periphery are not simply what we think of intuitively as central and marginal. For example, to a great extent, the sound-meaning pairings that define vocabulary may be categorized as peripheral. This is because the core or universal part of language is defined by a specific, explanatory function. It is, specifically, what allows us to learn language. The universals in Chomsky-type theories are just that subset of universals (in the Greenbergian sense) that form our innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Thus, the elements of that LAD are shared by all speakers of all languages. But that does not mean that they appear in all languages in the same surface form. Indeed, they could not appear in all languages because, in a P&P framework, the elements are principles with specified (i.e., specifically listed) variables. Learning a language consists largely in learning which variables to select from each list. For example, the “head directionality parameter” specifies that standard word order in a language can be head first or head last. (A “head” is “the word that a phrase is built around” [Baker 247].)

I should point out that the P&P framework is much more complex than I have indicated. For example, the parameters are not set at random, but in a definite order. Only after the head directionality parameter is set can certain other parameters be set. Indeed, setting one parameter one way typically sets some other parameters, in effect preventing the child from setting them. (For a lucid treatment of some of these complexities, see Baker.) Even in this simplified form, however, I hope it is clear why the head directionality parameter counts as a universal in (this particular) Chomskyan theory, even if there seem to be exceptions to its instantiation.  Those exceptions should be handled by principles and parameters which apply later, later both logically and developmentally (as can be argued on the basis of acquisition data).

I also hope it is clear, without entering into technical details, that the P&P framework or other Chomsky-type theories of universals can result in what Imre Lakatos called a “degenerating” research program. For example, it could develop in such a way as to require an increasing number of ad hoc principles which involve no generalizations of further linguistic patterns, but serve merely to allow for individual anomalies. An extreme and unrealistic, but illustrative case would be principles which referred to single languages as exceptions—say, a disjunctive parameter, such as “Is Aymara/is not Aymara,” with a simple statement of Aymara’s unique characteristics following from the former alternative. As such ad hoc principles multiply, the theory decreases in its explanatory power. Thus, these types of theories are open to rational adjudication. However, they are not open to simple falsification by the discovery of apparently anomalous properties in a particular language. In short, the intuitive case for the simple falsification of either Greenbergian or Chomskyan universals is not valid.

Before addressing literary universals, it is worth mentioning three other differences between Greenbergian and Chomskyan universals. (For a concise representation of the key differences, see Figure 1.) Again, Chomskyan universals serve to explain language acquisition—both what children acquire and in what order they acquire it; as part of this, they are also recruited to explain recurring errors made by children in the course of language acquisition. But how might the universals be explained? As they are innate, the obvious way in which the LAD universals would be explained is by evolution, though Chomsky has himself stressed that they could have developed by other means (cf. his comments on evolution in On Nature and New Horizons). In any case, Greenbergian universals are in principle open to any sort of explanation. Most importantly for our purposes, not being innate, they may have developed through convergent social development and thus be open to “culturalist” explanations. Moreover, as such, they may serve to explain various social or cultural developments as well. (Of course, all universals to some extent rely on innate features in some respect—for example, universals that concern visible objects rely to some extent on features of the human eye. However, in itself, that reliance is trivial.)

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Another difference is that Chomsky-type universals can be articulated in part through the examination of one language—say, English. This is because the LAD is the same for all children. Insofar as one is able to formulate the principles and parameters needed to learn English, one has formulated some of the principles and parameters needed to constitute the LAD. Though Chomskyan universals cannot be fully articulated without recourse to all available language data, initial articulation can rest on one language. In contrast, Greenberg-type universals must observe the constraints of genetic and areal distinctness far more rigorously. In other words, they must draw on languages that have independent lineages (genetic distinctness) and that have not influenced one another through contact (areal distinctness).

I have drawn on a non-innatist version of P&P theory as a model for aspects of my accounts of descriptive ethics (see Literature and Moral Feeling), authorial creativity and simulation (see How Authors’ Minds Make Stories), and other phenomena. But the applicability of a Chomsky-type theory to non-linguistic problems seems limited as the initial formulation of the theory is so narrowly tailored to issues of language. Indeed, I take it to be fairly clear that Chomskyan universals as such (thus, not merely as general models) are on the whole too restrictively defined to be of much direct use in literary study (exceptions to this would include some of Paul Kiparsky’s and Nigel Fabb’s work). In contrast, the Greenbergian stress on statistical universals and the possibility of social or cultural explanation fits the interests of literary scholars much more clearly than would a stress on acquisition. Acquisition of, for example, narrative appears to come down to the understanding of particular causal sequences and distinguishing agency from efficient causality. These do not appear to be problems unique to literature, but rather appear to be the sorts of thing developmental psychologists would study. More generally, whatever one thinks of the idea that language is a modular (thus, relatively independent) function of the human brain, there is clearly much more reason to think of language as modular than to think of literature as such. Thus, when literary theorists, such as Gerald Prince, drew on Chomsky-type theories to model narrative, they had reason to consider models from linguistics, but (I believe) erred in choosing a Chomsky-type theoretical framework.  

I should mention one more thing about Chomsky and Greenberg. In distinguishing these two types of theories, I passed over what they have in common. One part of this commonality is important for discussing universals. It is also commonly misunderstood, or not considered at all. To clarify this point, I need first to draw a terminological distinction between disciplinary description and explanation on the one hand and ultimate or underlying description and explanation on the other. By “disciplinary description and explanation,” I mean description and explanation of some particular set of phenomena as they appear to us within their field of study—say, linguistics with its references to phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties. By “underlying description and explanation,” I mean description and explanation in terms of some appropriate non-disciplinary mechanisms—usually material-biological or social; for example, description and explanation in terms of particular sequences of neuronal activation in particular regions of the brain associated with identifiable functions. At some point, the disciplinary descriptions and explanations should be identifiable with some underlying material-biological description and explanation. For example, in one version of his syntactic theory, “Government and Binding” theory, Chomsky takes it as a datum that “I wanna win the race” is grammatically fine, but that *”Who do you wanna win the race” is ungrammatical (see, for example, Lectures 181 and Rules 159-160). His explanation for this is (very roughly) that, in underlying structure, the question has an earlier version, “You want who to win the race.” The “who” moves to the front, but leaves a “trace” between “want” and “to.” That trace marks any contraction of “want” and “to” as ungrammatical. What does this have to do with disciplinary and underlying explanation? Well, the trace-blocking account of wanna-contraction (a disciplinary explanation, dealing as it does with familiar elements of language, such as words) should presumably have some correlate to the trace and some correlate to the movement of “who,” along with correlates to the other familiar, language elements in the underlying explanation of “wanna”-contraction. If such correlates are lacking, either the trace-blocking account is mistaken or the underlying account is inadequate to the phenomenon of “wanna”-contraction.

Note that this means one cannot simply take up a non-disciplinary concept from neuroscience–or any other area of cognitive or social science–and use it to explain an area such as language or literature, unless there is some way of translating that nondisciplinary account into the linguistic or literary account and vice-versa. The disciplinary account constitutes our fundamental explanation of the phenomena under consideration. The material account is, so to speak, an explanation of our disciplinary explanation. Actually, the same point holds for social explanations or any other accounts we would hope to be underlying explanations. For example, it is undoubtedly the case that language has developed in such a way as to facilitate cooperation. However, saying this does not constitute an explanation of any linguistic phenomena. If we want to explain language by cooperation, we need to explain how cooperation accounts for the preference for suffixes. Similarly, our acquisition and use of language have no doubt benefited from the mirror neuron system. But saying this does not even begin to isolate syntactic, morphological, phonological, or even lexical phenomena, to identify patterns within or across languages, or to say anything at all specific to language. (For a detailed criticism of the uncritical appeal to mirror neurons, which seems particular common in literary study, see Hickok.) This is not to say that underlying explanations must cohere into the single, unified system. Again, that is what Chomsky is seeking in at least some iterations of his linguistic theory. But in a Greenbergian account, an underlying explanation could form a patchwork of unrelated “local” theories. The key point is simply that, in each theory, there must be a point at which the entities named in the underlying account map directly onto the entities named in the disciplinary account in order to guarantee that the two accounts are treating the same objects and are explaining the same phenomena. Of course, any such mapping is bound to be highly complex. For instance, a word will be mapped onto some areas of cortex governing its pronunciation, other areas governing its meaning, and so on. The point is simply that loose, general correlations may provide us with areas to explore and they may be fruitful in that regard, but as long as they remain general correlations, they tell us nothing whatsoever about universals in the disciplinary field we are studying—language, narrative, literature, or whatever.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Mark. The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Chomsky, Noam. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht, Neth: Foris, 1981.

Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Chomsky, Noam. On Nature and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Chomsky, Noam. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

Clark, David, Nashaat Boutros, and Mario Mendez. The Brain and Behavior: An Introduction to Behavioral Neuroanatomy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Comrie, Bernard. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Culbertson, Jennifer, Paul Smolensky, and Géraldine Legendre. “Learning Biases Predict a Word Order Universal.” Cognition 122.3 (2012): 306-329.

Evans, N. and S. Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.5 (2009): 429–448.

Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: Norton, 2014.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022

Irish, Bradley. The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025.

Kiparsky, Paul. “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry.” In Essays in Modern Stylistics. Ed. Donald C. Freeman. London: Methuen, 1981.

Kiparsky, Paul. “On Theory and Interpretation.” In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Lakatos, Imre. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.

Levinson, Stephen. The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025.

Majid, A. “Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences.” Emotion Review 4.4 (2012): 432–443.

Prince, Gerald. A Grammar of Stories. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

In the two months since my February blog, my primary engagement with universals has been my response to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s influential argument against emotion universals. I articulated this response in a plenary talk I delivered remotely at a conference on “Predicting Emotion.” I refer interested readers to the recorded talk, which is available via Youtube at https://youtu.be/lA8TBF908PU ; the section on Barrett begins about ten minutes and fifty seconds into the talk and continues to the end.

In addition, there are two topics that I have not been able to research myself, but that perhaps one or another reader will be able to take up. The first concerns automata. In preparation for a conference on Artificial Intelligence, I was reading Artificial Intelligence For Dummies by Mueller, Massaron, and Diamond, when I came upon the following passage: “You find examples of automata in Europe throughout the ancient Greek civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modern times. . . . Automata weren’t exclusive to Europe. In the Middle East, many designs were created by the mathematician and inventor Al-Jazari (see tinyurl.com/e7yjh557 for details) and in Asia, China and Japan also developed their own versions of automata” (226-227).

I suspect that every cultural tradition has included at least some people—often, the majority—who have drawn a conceptual distinction between the body and the soul, positing an immaterial being that constitutes the “self” in addition to the material being that is somehow housing that immaterial self and in some manner expressing its intentions. Moreover, as injury and death apply most clearly to the body, I would imagine that all cultures also include some people who view the immaterial self as immortal, and therefore as separable from the body. If this is true, then it should not be surprising that both the immaterial and material components of the person can appear and exist on their own. In other words, once it is possible to have ghosts, it ought to be possible to have zombies also.

Of course, automata are not precisely zombies, though both are purely material beings, lacking a soul. I take it that the difference is that zombies are bodies that have arisen naturally (i.e., through human sexual reproduction), though the continuation of some degree of animacy (however minimal) without a soul is definitely unnatural. Automata, in contrast, are inventions, mechanical imitations of humans, created by humans. (They may also require empirically ascertainable, physicalistic causal sequences explaining their behavior, if we wish to exclude magically animated human creations—such as Golems—from the class of automata.) Logically speaking, automata may imitate human souls as well as human bodies, which is to say, they can apparently manifest intentions (such as trying to be helpful) as well as more obviously (merely) mechanical—or robotic–behaviors (such as walking). In other words, they may be taken to manifest a soul (i.e., a subjective self—think HAL in 2001).

In connection with the last point, Lalita Hogan reminds me that, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud quotes the “undoubtedly . . . correct” observation by Jentsch that “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for creating uncanny effects is to leave  the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (132). Freud goes on to stress, instead, the castration complex and, what is more promising, the idea of the “double” (the topic of an earlier blog at this site, available here), as well as other, standard psychoanalytic motifs, and residual, childhood attitudes to death. In addition to the doubtful character of psychoanalytic explanation, a problem with Freud’s essay is that he relies so heavily on his own intuitions as to what counts as uncanny. I see this as a problem because I am unsure that Freud has isolated a genuinely singular or unified phenomenon. Despite this, some of his inferences are quite plausible, even illuminating—for example, the idea that we have an “uncanny” feeling when we encounter some coincidence that appears to verify a childhood superstition that we think of ourselves as having outgrown (but are still inclined to accept), or the observation that even when we are certain that a story has elicited a specific emotion for us, we do not automatically and infallibly know just what aspects of the story gave rise to that emotion.

It is striking that, decades after Freud’s essay, Masahiro Mori published some informal observations and hypotheses on automata, maintaining that people’s sense of affinity with an automaton increases with increases in the human-like appearance of the automaton—until a point when the resemblance becomes “uncanny.” (Mori was writing in Japanese and presumably did not intend to allude to Freud.) At this point, people’s sense of affinity plummets. It then increases again as the automaton becomes virtually indistinguishable from a living person. Mori conjectures that this entire phenomenon is due to the uncanny automata resembling the dead rather than the living, our affinity for a corpse normally being much less than our affinity for a living person. Mori maintains that this reduction is intensified when the corpse (or some non-living part of a body, such as a prosthetic hand) moves in a way that we expect only living beings to move. In keeping with these points, Mori identifies automata with zombies at the nadir of the “uncanny valley” (as he christens the decline in affinity). There is an extensive literature on the “uncanny valley” hypothesis, both theoretical and empirical, with some writers supporting the claim and others disputing or modifying it. On the whole, however, the evidence for an effect along these lines seems strong and some version of the hypothesis appears to be widely accepted.

The cross-cultural interest inspired not only by souls, but by zombies and automata, raises several empirical questions about the distribution of these properties, which some reader may wish to explore, possibly setting out his or her findings on this website. These questions would include the following (confining ourselves to genetically and areally distinct traditions, though also allowing for the qualifications enumerated in the article on “Areal Distinctness,” available here): 

1) How widely attested is a belief in soul-body dualism?

2) How widely attested is a belief in ghosts?

3) How widely attested are zombies (in the sense given above)?

4) How widely attested are automata (also in the sense given above)? (This may be split into two questions if the automaton/golem distinction seems significant in light of the data.)

 5) In traditions where ghosts and/or zombies and/or automata (and/or golems) appear, do they regularly appear in a certain order historically (e.g., ghosts, then zombies, then automata) or with characteristic frequency (e.g., a lot of ghosts, but few zombies and very rare automata)?

6) Are there particular historical or social conditions that increase the likelihood that one or more will appear in the relevant cultural tradition?

7) What sorts of stories are told about each group (e.g., are zombies always threatening and automata routinely ambiguous as to whether or not they have inner, subjective experience)?

These and other questions could potentially serve as the basis for an engaging and informative research paper or even part of a dissertation, if only there were some students and faculty in relevant disciplines who had some interest in what makes people similar, instead of focusing all their attention on how groups (putatively) differ.

After reading an earlier version of this blog, Nigel Fabb reminded me that Pascal Boyer had addressed the issue of ghosts and zombies. As Boyer points out, “Zombies are animated corpses,” who do not have “intentions and goals” (Minds Make Societies 94-95). Boyer’s particular focus is on how such imaginative creations preserve all the default properties of the corresponding real objects, except for the one that is explicitly denied. Thus, zombies have all the properties of people—they are solid objects, located in a single place at any one time; they walk in (about) the way people walk, and so on—except they do not “control their own actions” (Religion Explained 73). These points are certainly valid and interesting. But they leave aside the issue of the relative frequency of such imaginative creations as zombies. They also do not touch on the issue of whether the narratives in which such imaginations appear diverge in some systematic way, telling different types of stories. In short, Boyer’s insights raise questions about the functional significance of zombies—as well as ghosts and automata—questions that, like the questions raised by Freud, Mori, and others, may be clarified and perhaps even answered, at least in a preliminary way, through literary study.

A second topic for possible research is the Medea revenge motif, where a mother kills her children to punish their father—a motif most famously associated with Euripides, but which has fascinated later European artists from Seneca to Lars von Trier, as well as postcolonial and minority writers such as Cherríe Moraga (see her 1995 The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea). I was intrigued to read of the motif recurring in Chikamatsu’s Kagekiyo Victorious, despite the fact that “Chikamatsu never read a foreign play, and he knew nothing of the theater outside his country [Japan]” (Keene 1). Does this motif turn up elsewhere? If so, what might explain this?

When we first put together the Literary Universals Project, I had hoped that the website would foster these sorts of suggestions for future research. Finally, I decided that instead of complaining—okay, in addition to complaining–that no one was posting possible topics for research, I would post a couple of possibilities myself.

Works Cited

Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper& Row, 1958, 122-161.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Emotion Elicitation, Prediction, and Anti-Universalism: Some Prolegomena to Emotional AI.” Plenary presentation for the Conference on Predicting Feeling: Literature, Neuroscience, and AI. Claremont McKenna College, 21 February 2025. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8TBF908PU .

Keene, Donald. “Introduction.” Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Trans., Donald Keene. New York: Columbis UP, 1990.

Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl MacDorman and Norri Kageki.  IEEE Spectrum (12 June 2012). Available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-uncanny-valley .

Mueller, John, Luca Massaron, and Stephanie Diamond. Artificial Intelligence For Dummies. 3^rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2025. Kindle Edition.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

In previous writing, I have taken pains to stress that the Literary Universals Project concerns descriptive, not normative universals. Thus, articles on the site may discuss universals of ethics. But those universals concern the description of norms, and do not have prescriptive force—just as the articles on religion (e.g., my last blog) address features common to religions, not which God or gods are the right ones. Consistent with these points, in Literature and Moral Feeling, I maintained that different ethical attitudes may be understood first of all as the setting of parameters, regarding some fundamental ethical principles. For example, the “scope parameter” governs who our ethical concerns favor. Basically, there are two values for this parameter. They are, roughly, a setting which prioritizes ethical obligation based or not based on the target’s social proximity to us—due either to a personal bond or to an identity category (usually with a further hierarchization of the former [affection-based relations] over the latter [identity-based relations]). In other words, one fundamental orientation given by this principle would prioritize the interests of relatives and friends over those of strangers, perhaps even excluding strangers from one’s ethical universe. Alternatively, one might not have any such prioritization, treating everyone as having the same ethical worth independent of one’s own emotional or identity-based relation to them. (Insofar as one cannot benefit everyone in the world one might prioritize cases based on such criteria as the urgency of a target’s need or the degree to which one’s aid is likely to be beneficial, but I count these as pragmatic decisions, not as part of one’s fundamental, ethical orientation.) Given the set of fundamental, orientational ethical principles (given by parameter settings), one may further concretize one’s ethical beliefs by specifying those orientational principles through narrative prototypes, such as heroic or romantic narratives. These narrative prototypes include predominant emotions. These emotions also serve to specify the orientational principles and to characterize different “styles” of ethical behavior.

For example, it seems clear then my own style of ethical evaluation is attachment-based, oriented toward romantic and familial narrative prototypes (both of which centrally involve attachment bonds). I am not certain exactly how to categorize Peter Singer’s ethical orientation–either fundamentally, emotionally, or in terms of narrative prototypes. (Given the frequency with which he recurs to cases of famine, hunger may be the motivational impulse that dominates his style of ethical thought, though it may also be grief or grief avoidance, as his examples commonly concern fatalities. Both are associated with narrative prototypes.) But it is fairly clear that it differs from my own. Consider for example Singer’s discussion of what I term the scope parameter. I agree with Singer that within limits we have greater moral obligations to some of those who are close to us than to people who are comparably situated in life but who are not close to us. For example, we have greater obligations to feed our own children than to feed hungry children elsewhere who are strangers to us. Moreover, I largely agree with Singer’s reasoning on this issue. However, some years ago when I discussed this issue in What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, I relied centrally on a rather different reason (see 236).

The point will be clearer if I return to the example that I used at the time. It’s a standard sort of ethical conundrum used by philosophers in discussing ethical issues. As such, it has the usual problems of such philosophical fictions or anecdotes (e.g., it asks us to assume certainty about outcomes when in real life we would never have such certainty–a point that renders problematic virtually all our intuitions about suitable responses in such circumstances; I have discussed this in Literature and Moral Feeling [see 16 and 53]). Specifically, I took Mengzi’s example of a child who is about to fall into a well and drown an example also taken up by Peter Singer. The dilemma in this case is that by an unfortunate coincidence my own child has fallen into a well at the same time. It is simply stipulated as part of the dilemma that I cannot save both children. The question is–which should I save? (Note that this question arises no matter how one set one’s scope parameter. I have set mine to the egalitarian value, but would favor saving one’s own child in this scenario.) The first thing to say here is that the crucial point is that one needs to save one of the children, not waste time reflecting on fine points of ethical theory. As one’s preference will lie with one’s own child it seems likely that one will be more diligent in pursuing the rescue of one’s own child and thus the one will be more likely to succeed in rescuing one’s own child. In contrast, attempting to rescue the other child may lead one to feel distracted and double-minded, which may in turn inhibit one’s efforts and result in one becoming more likely to fail. The second thing to say here is that whichever choice is better by the lights of some absolute moral theory, we should presumably not blame the parent who rescues his or her own child, especially given the division of labor that assigns the role—of protecting this particular child–to the parent. This is not to say that there are no circumstances in which a parent who saves his or her own child would be blameworthy. For example, having saved one’s own child, one should immediately try to save the other child, even if that appears impossible. A parent who did not do this would be blameworthy. (This is one place where the certainty posited in the “thought experiment” may lead us astray, for we are very unlikely to have absolute certainty that saving both children is impossible.)

Though Singer invokes only the second reason (in an admittedly very different form of the division of labor argument, drawn from Goodin in his case), both seem to me to be the same sort of general, rational reason that Singer does invoke. In contrast, perhaps the most compelling reason for me to favor saving one’s own child in this scenario is very different. Specifically, I imagine the final moments of the two children before they drown. Both are overwhelmed with panic. But one’s own child would also feel a sort of grief at being abandoned by one of his or her primary attachment objects (i.e., his or her parents), thus a sense of rejection bordering on betrayal. When I find this concern the most compelling reason for saving one’s own child, it is an instance of my stylistic preference for attachment-based ethical reasoning. I should also point out that my reasons for preferring one’s own child in cases of this sort is generalizable and does not rely on prioritizing the near and dear over strangers, as such. Rather the reasons I have given–that one is more likely to succeed in saving one’s own child, that the social division of labor assigns one that role implicitly, and that one’s own child is likely to suffer more if one does not try to rescue him or her–do not presuppose that it is in general a superior policy to favor Individuals one likes or with whom one shares an identity category. Indeed, in other situations the same principles could favor the stranger over one’s own child.

In Literature and Moral Feeling, I draw on a range of areally and genetically unrelated literatures in making my arguments about fundamental, ethical orientation, etc. In consequence, I believe these points constitute plausible universals—first, ethical, then literary (due to the presence of ethical concerns in the literatures of various traditions). But note that they are descriptive and not normative universals. In other words, the universal principle is only that people’s moral attitudes evidence these sorts of inclination—specifically, a fundamental orientation, further specified through a preferred emotion and a prototypical narrative structure. Nothing in what I have said implies that my particular ethical preferences are right. Indeed, even if they are shared in great detail across cultures, they do not constitute a normative universal in that it would be possible for a given attitude to be shared even by all people yet still have no moral force. This can be seen by the simple fact that if Nazi propaganda had succeeded and literally everyone adopted fascist beliefs that would not make such beliefs normatively valid.

Of course, to some extent this conclusion is trivial given my contention that there are no objective facts about norms—ethical, aesthetic, or otherwise. If I’m correct, then no maxim has moral force per se. Beliefs only have motivational force for the individuals who hold those beliefs. But we can have rational dialogue about these beliefs, disputing for example the degree to which they are coherent, the degree to which they adopt factual presuppositions that are or are not plausible, and so on. Given this, it does seem possible to marshal evidence of descriptive universality toward the goal of defending a particular normative belief not as correct in and of itself but as common, as shared, across different traditions or cultures. Again, this does not give the belief in question normative force. However, it does give us a way of arguing that “cultural difference” does not constitute a definitive reason for disallowing one’s belief in a particular norm or one’s commitment to that norm. In short, it disables the cultural relativist claim that one’s ethically normative beliefs are rendered invalid by vast differences in culture. The point holds–perhaps even more strongly–if one does indeed accept the objective existence of moral norms, as does Singer (see, for example, “How”). I say this because if norms do indeed have an objective existence, then it seems plausible that there would be some way in which we could find out what those norms are. It also seems plausible that people from different traditions and cultures would all have access to those norms. Thus, the objective norms would be likely to appear among individuals—perhaps a minority of such individuals–in a variety of cultures.

In keeping with these points, then, it seems that literary, ethical, and other universals though descriptive can indeed have bearing on normative principles, whether one holds that moral norms have an objective existence or rejects that belief. Indeed, in One World, Singer does make a case for the normative value of reciprocity based in part on the cross-cultural recurrence of beliefs in the ethical value of reciprocity. Singer notes that “Some aspects of ethics can fairly be claimed to be universal, or very nearly so.” Specifically, he writes that “Reciprocity, at least, seems to be common to ethical systems everywhere” (citing Gouldner 171). He goes on to point out that “the notion of reciprocity may have served as the basis for the “Golden Rule”–treat others as you would like them to treat you [or, alternatively, do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you].” He then points out that, in the decade that preceded his writing of One World, there was “an attempt to draw up a ‘Declaration of a Global Ethic,’ a statement of principles that are universally accepted across all cultures.” As eventually approved, that declaration includes the Golden Rule, identified as “the irrevocable, unconditional [ethical] norm for all areas of life” (quoting from Swidler). This is in keeping with the fact that “the Golden Rule can be found, in differing formulations, in a wide variety of cultures and religious teachings, including, in roughly chronological order, those of Zoroaster, Confucius, Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), the Buddha, the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the Book of Leviticus, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, Kant, and many others” (Singer, citing Swidler 19-21).

Something along the lines of the golden rule does then appear to be at least a statistical universal. To have this status it must be in some degree convincing to a range of people across traditions. It does not seem to me however that this convincing quality is a matter of reciprocity. To my ear reciprocity recalls tit for tat behavior–doing unto others as they have done unto you whether that doing is good or ill. Indeed, it seems to me that the golden rule is directly opposed to reciprocity in this sense. (Singer briefly suggests this, when he writes that, by the golden rule, one’s behavior is “not necessarily related to how someone actually has treated you in the past.” But in the same sentence he refers to this as a form of “reciprocity,” which seems to me inconsistent with the qualification just quoted, even allowing for the weakening of that qualification via the phrase, “not necessarily.”) Rather the golden rule seems to me consistent with three inclinations that I see as fundamental to our moral sensibilities—again, across cultures. These are 1) our inclination to form ethical norms which we see as universalizable and exceptionless (ethical conflicts are a problem because both alternatives retain their moral force, so that one must act unethically, no matter what one does); 2) our inclination to empathize with others particularly in their suffering and for that empathy to give rise to motivations, specifically motivations to ameliorate that suffering (I call these “non-egocentric motivations”); 3) our inclination to identify a subset of those non-egocentric, empathic motivations with the ethical norms (of #1) at least insofar as they satisfy further cognitively specified principles of consistency, etc. (e.g., insofar as they satisfy utilitarian or Kantian requirements, depending on our preferred method of determining ethical norms).

I should emphasize once again however that this does not provide evidence for the validity of a particular ethical norm. It merely tells us that advocates of a particular norm–the norm embodied in the golden rule—are likely to find allies in a range of other traditions. Indeed, even if one does not find allies already formed in another society, the ubiquity of the golden rule suggests that some members of other societies are likely to be open to the idea of the golden rule, to be convinced by its arguments in its favor, and so on. Finally, I should say that this does not mean that something like the golden rule is innate. Something like the notion of a moral norm–a universalizable norm that is also exceptionless (in the sense just mentioned)—may be innate, though it may be derivable from principles of rule abstraction and generalization, along with the non-egocentric, but motivated nature of ethics, which I take to be definitional; a type of act (e.g., eating an orange) may be perfectly fine, but it just is not ethics if we act out of self-interest or act randomly. I am more inclined to think that the capacity to empathize spontaneously or effortfully—indeed, the regular practice of empathizing in both ways– is part of of our innate nature. Given these two components however it seems to me that their synthesis–making ethical norms into instances of non-egocentric—thus, empathic–motivation is virtually inevitable in a certain number of cases. The fact that it does not occur in all cases is evidence that the golden rule is not innate per se. However, the components are there and are likely to be synthesized when appropriate circumstances

Future Directions

The implications of the preceding comments for a future study seem straightforward. We should seek other commonalities across genetically and aerially unrelated ethical traditions. This task was facilitated in the case of the golden rule by some close parallels in phrasing which made the commonalities more obvious. Other cases are likely to be more concealed, discoverable only after interpretation of superficially different phrases. This interpretation is almost necessarily culturally nuanced. It seems to be a common belief in culture studies today that culturally sensitive interpretation is virtually guaranteed to show great differences between cultures. I seem to be almost alone in my experience that the more I learned about a culture the more similarities I see between us and them and the fewer significant or “deep” differences I can discern. In any case, acquiring such cultural knowledge and sensitivity should not discourage us. Not only is it instrumentally valuable in revealing ethical universals; it also constitutes a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

I suspect that there are many different ethically normative tendencies that re-appear (with variations) across traditions, just as there are different ethically normative tendencies that appear in Western ethical tradition. But I should stress once again that, though the content of these will be normative–that is after all the point–they will nonetheless be descriptive universals. Indeed, insofar as they are incompatible with one another we could not take them all to be normative as that would lead us to commit ourselves to contradictory “ethical” behaviors. I rather suspect that we will find for the most part the usual alternatives for moral adjudication that we find in our own culture. Of course these will be formulated differently, just as different forms of consequentialism or deontology are formulated differently in the West. Moreover, those differences in formulation are likely to be significant and indeed valuable, for they are likely to give us different perspectives on fundamental issues in ethics—again, as we find with different theories in the West. But at the same time recognizing the universality of at least some fundamental beliefs about normative ethics (and, again, I suspect that “some” greatly understates the case) will reassure us that it is indeed possible to engage in productive, rational dialogue across and not only within cultural traditions. Indeed, I suspect that, if we are able to set aside our (largely content-neutral) biases derived from in- versus out-group divisions, we will find that we are no less likely to reach fundamental agreement with members of alien cultures than with members of our own. Indeed, this may ultimately lead us to realize that, in many ways, we are not  justified in our unreflective categorization of one culture as “alien” and another as “our own.”

See also Peter Singer’s response.

WORKS CITED

Goodin, Robert. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Gouldner, Alvin. “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement.” American Sociological Review 25.2 (1960): 161-178.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Singer, Peter. “How I Changed My Mind About Objective Morality.” Interview from The Institute of Art and Ideas. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn2dT9Lrko4&t=16s .

Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Unpaginated Kindle Edition.

Swidler, Leonard, ed. For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. Ashland, OR: White Cloud P, 1999.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Since we revived the Literary Universals Project in 2016, I’ve been expecting, and hoping, to receive an article on literature and religion. This is not only because the topic is intrinsically interesting, but also because the data are complicated in a way that I believe illustrates some of the challenges that face the study of literary universals. I am very far from an expert in the field. However, cognizant of the relative informality allowed by a blog post, I finally decided that I should just go ahead and treat some of the material that I am familiar with, in the hope that this will inspire other writers, with greater depth and breadth of knowledge, to extend or correct my comments. To give a rough idea of what should be included here, I count something as literary if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients in part for the experience of emotions, whether those be suspense, wonder at beauty, empathic love, or something else. I count something as religious if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients because they believe that it communicates truths—including moral truths–that transcend mundane, human life.

To Start: A Small Point About Starting Points

Writers who argue that there are literary universals are often accused of Eurocentrism. That is probably often the case, though not necessarily in the morally objectionable sense of “Eurocentrism.” For example, writers raised and educated in Western societies often start out making use of the emotion concepts of their native language. I don’t see this as a problem, as long as emotion concepts from other languages are also included in the research program eventually and as long as researchers are sensitive to contravening evidence regarding their own-language concepts. My assumption would be that, if an emotion concept names an emotion that people in one culture experience, then it is probably an emotion that some people in other cultures do—or at least could–also experience. Conversely, if the concept is problematic when a researcher seeks to apply it to other societies, that probably suggests a problem with its application to his or her own society as well. For example, a common view of romantic love in the U.S. appears to be that it is “true love” only if it is eternal. In some other societies, researchers might have difficulty finding cases of true love, conceived in this way, as common conceptions of romantic love view it as ephemeral and those conceptions are likely to affect the ways in which people report their emotions. But it would actually be difficult to find “true love” in the U.S. also. Attachment or companionate love can be enduring, and seems to occur everywhere in an enduring form (e.g., parents do not stop loving their children after a certain interval). But “romantic love lasts between twelve and eighteen months” (Fisher 100) “True love” is as non-existent in the U.S. as elsewhere. We learn this when we begin to research “true love,” rather than assuming, for culturalist reasons, that we have it and other people don’t. In this way, having multiple, (temporarily) culture-“centric” starting points should only enrich our study of universals, rather than limiting it.

In any event, whatever my unself-conscious presuppositions may be, and however European they may be, this issue does not usually arise with my self-conscious adoption of models. Specifically, my explicit model for a given form of cross-cultural literary study is more likely to be Indian than European. This is in part a result of personal interest, and in part a matter of having learned about Indian literature through explicit study, rather than implicit assimilation. What is most important, however, is that in many respects, Indian literature and Indian religion—or, perhaps, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion—seem often more finely differentiated and more comprehensive than the parallel cultural forms in other traditions.

By “finely differentiated,” I mean having clear, systematic definitions for key concepts. By “comprehensive,” I mean having a logically complete set of key concepts. For example, in religious philosophy, Indic traditions of ontology may be organized by reference to a few basic principles, which are subjected to systematic variation, yielding a set of logical alternatives. If we begin with the distinction between spirit and matter (puruṣa and prakṛti in Sanskrit), and that between monism and dualism, the logical possibilities are as follows: Dualism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist; in the Indian tradition, this is the Sāṃkhya school (see Grimes 282-283). Monism: only puruṣa exists; this is Advaita Vedānta (see Grimes 15). Monism: only praṛkti exists; this is Cārvāka (see Grimes 102). Monism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist, but they are not distinct from one another (e.g., to use current philosophical terminology, they are two aspects of the same [single] reality); this is “Absolute Monism” (see Pandit 45; see also Dmitrieva). The only remaining possibility is that neither exists. I am not sure that I know what such a claim means. But it is very reminiscent of the Buddhist idea that everything is śūnyatā or the void (see Grimes 305).  In effect, this covers all the schools of early Indic metaphysics, and indeed all possible schools defined by these premises. That breadth is what makes Indian metaphysics perhaps uniquely “comprehensive,” as I just put it. The explicit, well-specified definitions of each school are what make it “finely differentiated.”

Comprehensiveness and fine differentiation as found in Indian traditions here have two consequences that are worth drawing out. First, all societies that have some practice of the relevant kind (here, they all have an ontology, or several—disputed–ontologies). As such, they must take up at least one of the possibilities set out in the early Indian scheme. Second, the existence of all the logical possibilities in India entails that there is not some general principle of cultural uniformity that prevents different people in a given society from believing distinct metaphysics or any one person from changing his or her mind. (On common assumptions about cultural uniformity, and some reasons why they are misguided–see Moody-Adams).

Actually, there is one significant aspect of ontology that is not explicitly separated out in Indian metaphysics, at least not early on. That is just where one should locate the mind. In Sāṃkhya, the mind is prakṛti. In the West, it has more usually fallen under the category of puruṣa. This is the sort of difference that can be very productive intellectually for both groups when they interact with one another and are thereby faced with contradictions between their assumptions and those common in the other society. Of course, our topic here is religious literature, not ontology, but the same basic principles apply.

From the Vedas to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas

The most ancient, sacred texts of Hinduism are the Vedas. The first part of the Vedas, called “Saṃhitā,” meaning “collection” (Feuerstein 254), includes a range of hymns or poems. Within the Indian tradition, these are exemplary cases of religious literature. As such they have a number of characteristics that suggest possible candidates for universals of religious literature. Here are some:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural).
• These scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals.
• Such works frequently include allusions to myths, legends, and/or historical events.
• These canonical literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which some verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals.
• The collection of such works includes praise of deities and petition for benefits from them (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall; see 5.83, pp. 172-174 of O’Flaherty).

Of these, petitionary prayer and hymns of praise are the functionally-defined categories of religious verse or, more broadly, religious literature that are most obviously candidates for universality. They are both pervasive in Christianity. Thus, we find both in such standardized prayers as the “Our Father.” Poems of praise are to be found throughout the psalms, which are Jewish in origin, but have become part of Christian religious literature as well. These functions are clearly not confined to the verses that are themselves part of the religion’s textual canon (parallel to the Vedic hymns). They appear also in works written by later authors in a literary context that is not specifically religious. For example, John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is a (highly innovative) petitionary verse. As to presence in ritual, even a cursory look at the Catholic mass shows the presence of both types of literary speech (i.e., celebratory and petitionary). There has certainly been interpretive and scholarly commentary on the parts of the bible that we are likely to count as literature, though such attention is hardly confined to the poetic parts of that book.

Beyond Hinduism and Christianity, Gerstenberger discusses the presence of both forms of poetry in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew verse. Moreover, he connects these functions with religious ritual (see 86-87). In addition, he isolates further characteristics of some religious literature, such as “confession of guilt” (83). This is of course an important feature of Christian tradition, and appears as part of the sacrificial story structure (see “Story”), which I will leave aside, having discussed story genres at length elsewhere (see chapter six of The Mind and Its Stories and chapter three of Affective Narratology). Gerstenberger goes on to refer to ritually-embedded petitionary prayer in the Americas as well, citing Navajo practice (85).

In Orthodox Islam, the Qur’ān is seen not only as the divinely revealed truth, but as the ne plus ultra of aesthetic excellence–thus, in effect, the greatest poetry (though believers would not phrase it this way). For example, Allen notes that “miraculous qualities” were “attributed to its style” (52). Despite this, for historical reasons, one of its surahs (the twenty-sixth) treats poets as deceptive and dangerous enemies of Islam. This makes the nature and use of poetry in Islam particularly complex. At the same time, however, I believe the aestheric status of the Qur’ān gives us license to count virtually any part of it as literature, as marked by the aesthetic qualities of verbal art. This, in turn, suggests a small but significant revision of the first candidate universal, which should now read as follows:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural). Sacred texts may also incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse.

This makes sense in part because there is no clear reason why, as a general rule, religions would canonize a particular body of verse. The revised version indicates that a spiritually elevated text would be associated with various sorts of excellence, including aesthetic excellence, and that there are different ways of accomplishing this—through a focally aestheticized part or through a more diffusely aestheticized whole. This also suggests a revision of our second possible universal, which might now read as follows:

• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.

Here, too, the most obvious reason for the connection is that ritual—like canonical texts—is pre-eminent for its spiritual and moral excellence. As the most excellent of all excellences (from the religious point of view), one might reasonably view it as subsuming other excellences, including those that are aesthetic.

Continuing for the moment with Islam, it is unsurprising that praise of Allāh is pervasive in the Qur’ān. Petitionary appeals seem to be infrequent, perhaps due to the philosophical problems with petitionary prayer in monotheisms (see, for example, Davison). Even so, requests aimed at God are not absent. The Qur’ān begins “Praise be to Allāh, the Lord of the worlds” (Ali 1.1). It continues, “Thee do we beseech for help/Guide us on the right path” (Ali 1.4-5). Given that the Qur’ān, even more than the Vedic hymns, constitutes the centerpiece of its religion, it is unsurprising that it has been subjected to widespread analysis. This prominently includes the presentation of background, completing stories that are presented in only fragmentary, elliptical, allusive fashion, as with the Vedic hymns. It is also unsurprising that the Qur’ān figures in Islamic ritual—most obviously in the profession of faith and in the daily prayers required of Muslims (though, again, it is not so much the specific text as the broader aestheticization that seems crucial here).

Of the major written traditions, I have not yet mentioned those in China. China is an unusual case as the dominant belief systems in the society have downplayed ideas of divinity, relying principally on the relatively abstract and impersonal ideas, such as Tiān or Heaven. In some ways, Heaven has the same functions as the concept of God in the monotheistic religions. For example, the Tiāndào or Way of Heaven is the morally right path. That morally right path underwrites the sorts of social hierarchy that are often underwritten by “divine command” elsewhere, as when the Tiāndào is invoked to support filial piety (xiào), just as divine command is invoked to support “Honor[ing] thy father and thy mother” in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments.

More precisely, the dominant religious orientations in China have been, first, Rú Jiā (“Confucianism”), associated with the sage, Kǒngzǐ (“Confucius”), followed by Dàoism, associated with the sage, Lǎozǐ. These are later joined by Buddhism. The foundational text of Dàoism is the Dàodéjīng, a highly poetic work, which certainly satisfies our aesthetic hypothesis (#1). It has also generated a sizable set of explications, along the lines suggested by other traditions. (For example, influential commentaries by Heshang Gong [2^nd Century C.E.] and Cheng Xuanying [7^th Century C.E.] are readily available in English.)

As to petitionary prayer, the different religious schools are not so mutually exclusive as the Middle Eastern monotheisms. In consequence, “According to individual needs and circumstances, lay persons may . . . address prayers and petitions indifferently to Dàoist, Buddhist, or popular deities” (Pregadio). On the other hand, neither petitionary prayer nor praise of a deity appears to be a common use of Dàoist or Confucian literature. Indeed, it does not appear to be a common use of religious literature in much of Buddhism either. This relative paucity of both genres seems likely to be a function of the degree to which the religions teach that important goals can—indeed, must–be achieved by the efforts of individual aspirants alone, as opposed to those that assert the centrality of something along the lines of divine grace. The Chinese religious philosophies tend to stress individual effort. Something like divine grace does become more prominent with Mahāyāna Buddhism, where the need for the beneficence of a bodhisattva is evident. This is particularly salient in Pure Land Buddhism, which is important for us as it guides a number of Chinese and Japanese literary works that are religious in their themes, though they are not themselves scriptural. A striking example is Zeami’s Atsumori in which the main character calls on the Amida Buddha to bring him and his enemy into the Pure Land where they may overcome their antipathy and reach enlightenment together. Even so, Mahāyāna Buddhism does generally maintain a commitment to personal effort as a key factor in achieving enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, it seems fairly common for Buddhist literary works to suggest the benefits of Buddhist equanimity—rather than, say, appealing to a bodhisattva for spiritual aid. For example, a Buddhist poet, such as Wáng Wéi (8^th-Century China), may seek to convey the emotional results of a Buddhist sensibility through the depiction of the peacefulness of the speaker’s relation to nature. Other prominent examples of this sort may be found in the poetry of Bashō (17^th-Century Japan).

Of the East Asian religions, perhaps the most interesting, for our purposes, is Rú Jiā, due to the unusual way in which it conforms to these cross-cultural patterns. First, it does develop a central canon of religious poetry. Indeed, the Classic of Poetry (Shījīng) is so important to Rú Jiā that Confucian scholars were expected to memorize the 305 poems it contains. What is surprising here is that so many of the poems evidently deal with secular matters, such as love affairs. These are recruited to religious purposes through the extensive commentaries that turn evidently irreligious or at least non-religious poems into coded treatments of religious topics, principally morals. Thus, the Classic of Poetry includes the features we have been considering. However, it shapes this collection of poetry into a religious canon, not only—perhaps not even primarily–through the straightforward, intuitive meanings of the poems, but through self-consciously counter-intuitive reinterpretations of these poems.

As to the genres of the poetry, praise appears often enough. However, it is not praise of Heaven, but praise of morally exemplary individuals. This is what one would expect from a tradition that depersonalizes the usual, anthropomorphic divine beings. Tiān is, after all, a somewhat odd target for eulogizing. On the other hand, the narratives of exemplary individuals constitute another cross-cultural pattern in religious literature. We might then formulate a sixth candidate universal as follows:

• Stories of morally exemplary figures, often life stories, are frequently part of the set of sacred writings or at least have a sort of semi-canonical status for the religion. (In referring to “semi-canonical” works, I have in mind the model of śruti and smṛti in Hinduism; the former comprises eternal, revealed works, while the latter includes the most highly regarded, but still corrigible texts that originated at a particular time and place as the product of a human author.)

When possible, the morally exemplary subjects of such biographies are both divine and human or, if only human, are uniquely associated with the divine world. Thus, another Hindu scripture—more popular and more widely revered than the Vedas—is the Rāmāyaṇa, the exemplary life of the incarnation of the god, Viṣṇu, as Rāma. The point is no less obvious in the case of Christianity, where each gospel is a life of the morally exemplary divine incarnation, Jesus. The attention to the culminating prophet, Muḥammad, in Islam is similar. While not divine, Muḥammad is as close as a human comes to that status. For believers, his life represents the Sunnah or correct path; it stands as “the authoritative example of the way a Muslim should live” (Waines 288). This path (of Muḥammad’s life) appears somewhat elliptically in the canonical Ḥadîth and more fully in ibn Isḥâq’s (8^th-Century C.E.) Life of God’s Messenger, a work of nearly scriptural status. The life of the Buddha is exemplary also, without there being any particularly canonized or near canonized version, as far as I am aware—though there are works esteemed as part of the relevant literary canons, such as Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit drama, The Life of the Buddha. We also find exemplar-defining works recounting the lives of the Christian saints and lives of the Jain Elders (e.g., by Hemacandra).

It seems to be the case that the exemplary biographies must frequently resolve moral inconsistencies, conflicts between the way people act—or even the way gods are imagined to act—and the moral idealization demanded by the genre. As Barrett points out, we imagine gods  in much the same way we imagine people, though we may deny this when asked (see chapter eight of Barrett). Barrett does not extend this to our moral imagination, but the stories themselves would seem to suggest that such an extension is warranted. Consider the Fall of humankind. Referring to Paradise Lost, the esteemed literary critic, William Empson, observed that God “kills Adam and Eve and all their descendants for eating an apple,” which is the sort of behavior we would expect from “a merciless tyrant” (Leonard xxv, summarizing Empson), not the morally ideal agent. Of course, Milton’s poem is non-canonical (i.e., not part of scripture). But parallel points apply to many acts in canonical scriptures as well. Religious authorities must in some way deal with this problem. Sometimes, the canonical version just eliminates the offensive act (though we can know this only if an original including the act has been preserved). In narratological terms, this would involve rectifying the ethics of the work at the level of the story. When present in the story, the problematic act may be backgrounded, perhaps recounted diffusely, so that it requires effortful, self-conscious inference. In this way, a sort of ethical resolution is produced through discourse, the way the story is told. The Confucian approach accomplishes its purposes a bit differently, altering the standard interpretation rather than the story or the discourse (for examples, see Cai; actually all traditions adopt a number of strategies, but in varying proportions). Hindu traditions offer yet another another form of this ethical rectification by in effect placing an interpretation of the act in the story (through a character) or by way of discourse (through a narrator). For example, this occurs with some of Rāma’s more morally objectionable acts, such as abandoning his wife. In the context of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, it is clear that the mistreatment of Sītā has its source in patriarchal structure. In consequence,  the ethical contradictions that concern this mistreatment are not simply character flaws in Rāma, but are a reflection of the patriarchal structure and associated sexism and misogyny of the society. In this way, the ethical contradictions in any religious literature may derive from the politics of the society, rather than the psychology of the hero or heroine.

Leaving aside Gerstenberger’s reference to Navajo religion, the preceding comments have been confined to major world religions. Nonetheless, the cases we have considered do suggest the plausibility of a claim that the following tendencies are at least statistical universals of religious literature.

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works (often, poems) as central, canonical—thus scriptural–texts (oral or written). Sacred texts also tend to incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse. (These scriptural works of verbal art should be distinguished from religious works of verbal art that have no scriptural status.)
• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.
• Religious literary works frequently allude to myths, legends, or historical events, in effect presupposing the reader’s or listener’s familiarity with those works.
• Canonical, literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals. In other words, the scriptural works of verbal art come to be embedded in traditions of commentary. Moreover, the commentaries may be incompatible with one another and with the most obvious, literal interpretation of the texts.
• Scriptural, literary works—and, to a great extent, non-canonized religious literary works also—often praise deities and petition them for benefits (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall). While the praise is usually explicit, the petitionary purpose may be expressed indirectly, unless it is aimed at specifically spiritual or moral benefit (thus, some version of grace).
• Canonical religious story literature commonly recounts a religion’s myths.
• One particularly important genre of scriptural or near-scriptural story literature recounts the life of some moral exemplar.
• The fashioning of morally exemplary lives often involves reconciling human fallibility with the idealization that is required by the genre. In addition, it is likely to require the reconciliation of an unethical, ideological bias with moral or religious principles that contradict it (see, for example, the arguments used in the Bhagavad Gita in support of war). Such reconciliation may be achieved by changing (bowdlerizing) the relevant texts, changing the interpretation of those texts, or rationalizing the moral failings of the exemplar.

I imagine that some of these points (e.g., the importance of praise and petition) carry over to a range of orally transmitted religions, while others (e.g., the expanding corpus of commentaries) might be confined to highly literate societies. But I will have to leave those issues for another time (and probably another author).

Bhakti

It is important to turn now to a form of religious feeling that has been highly productive and is one source of much literature that has been both popular for spiritual reasons and esteemed for its aesthetic accomplishments. In an Indian context, this is referred to as literature of “bhakti,” which is usually translated as “devotion.” Bhakti is not the emotion of the poet who petitions Indra, an anthropomorphic deity who rules over the anthropomorphic Hindu pantheon and who might be prevailed upon to produce rain. Rather, it is a feeling of intense longing, a feeling that one’s well-being is wholly dependent on achieving and sustaining a close connection with the object of devotion—whether Viṣṇu as the warrior Rāma, or Viṣṇu as baby Kṛṣṇa, or the Goddess as a protective slayer of demons. In short, it is love. The bhakta or devotee may love the deity as one loves a romantic partner—as is most common in literature–or as one loves a parent, or one’s child, or a dear friend.  We find examples of each sort in Indian literature.

This is not unique to South Asia, though the emphasis on romantic love is even more pronounced in other traditions. Most obviously, we find it in the mystical poets of Christianity and Islam. The former include such figures as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Lamenting the relative neglect of these writers today, Housden pleads that “we [Christians] too have our great love songs to God, our cries of longing, our sorrows of separation, our bliss of union” (xvii; see Housden for a selection of Christian mystical poetry also). In the mystical branch of Islam, Ṣūfī writers sometimes employed allegory to convey their unorthodox views. The allegory was regularly one of romantic love. For example, Nizami’s great narrative poem, Layla and Majnun, represents Majnun’s passionate longing for spiritual union with Allāh indirectly as Majnun’s passionate longing for romantic union with Layla.

But there is a difficulty here. The clear cases of religious bhakti literature are found almost entirely in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Perhaps the earliest examples of such poetry are to be found in Judaism (“The Song of Songs”) and Hinduism (e.g., in the Kṛṣṇabhakti sections of the Bhagavad Gītā). Ṣūfism was influenced by Hinduism, and Christian mysticism was influenced by Ṣūfism. Due to such influence (“areal contamination,” as it is sometimes called), we cannot feel confident that these three cases point to a universal feature of religious literature (in the technical sense of universal). On the other hand, we almost certainly need to loosen this linguistic criterion in the case of literature (see the section on areal contact in “What are Literary Universals?”). In any event, given the degree of contact between these three religions and other religious traditions, we are left to wonder why a form of sacred poetry so enthusiastically embraced from India to Spain seems not to have inspired similar devotion on the part of Confucians, Buddhists, and others.

One possible explanation begins with the nature of the emotion at issue. No matter which analogy best fits the poet’s feelings—spousal, parental, or filial love or close friendship—a central component of those feelings is attachment care. Though prototypically associated with the bonding of parents and small children, attachment is a key component of romantic love and deep, enduring friendship as well. One peculiarity of attachment as an emotion system is that it takes individual persons as its targets. Most emotions are elicited by any member of a class of objects. While it is possible to be afraid of one particular wolf and not others, we are usually wary of all wolves. In contrast, a toddler is likely to be attached to his or her own mother, not everyone who shares the property of being a mother, and similarly the mother is attached to her own child.

Understanding this fact about attachment might lead us to hypothesize that attachment relations to a deity would be marked by two features. First, the attachment object should be singular. Second, that target should be distinguished by individuating characteristics. After all, the toddler identifies his or her mother, and rejects substitutes; he or she must be able to distinguish one from the other—by scent, voice, and so on. These two features of attachment would seem to suggest that the members of monotheistic religions might be more open to a bhakti orientation, at least insofar as that religion imagines the deity to be distinctively personified. In the technical terminology of the study of universals, this would constitute an hypothesis of a typological and statistical universal (see “What are Literary Universals?”), an hypothesis that literatures of a certain type—here, religious literatures associated with a monotheistic religion–are (statistically) more likely to develop works expressing a bhakti-like passionate emotion for God, modeled particularly on romantic love.

At least, as a simple, first approximation, this seems to fit the data reasonably well. Various forms of Christianity clearly share these characteristics. In consequence, it is unsurprising to find an emphasis on devotional love in some of its literature and at least lip service to love in its general teaching. Islam too fits here in being monotheistic. In orthodox Islam, Allāh is rather minimally personified, but He is given a voice and some traits through the Qur’ān. On the other hand, Ṣūfī mysticism—often considered heretical in orthodox Islam—is perhaps the form of bhakti-based religious poetry and prose that involves the most elaborate creation of individual characters to allegorize the mystic’s relation to God. We see this in, for example, Niẓāmī’s development of the spiritual allegory of Laila and Majnun, or in some elements of ‘Aṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds (also mystical allegories), and in the dense metaphors of Rūmī’s poetry. We find a similar situation in Judaism—a monotheism with a rather minimally personified deity. Jewish tradition does include the early “Song of Songs,” a love poem commonly interpreted as an allegory for the relation between the Jewish people and God (see Jerusalem 991). In keeping with this, Harold Bloom sees the poem as influencing St. John of the Cross (see 221-222). Still, given the way in which Ṣūfī mystical poetry  developed, we might expect to find more bhakti-like literary work in unorthodox writings of Judaism—perhaps, for example, those influenced by Kabbalah.

Given that the other clear cases are all monotheisms, one might wonder how India became such an important source of bhakti-based literature. But, in fact, Hinduism has a monotheistic structure, albeit of an unusual type. It refers to an array of “gods.” However, the anthropomorphic court of Indra is not of the same ontological type as the “Trinity” of Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. Moreover, for many Hindu theologians—indeed, virtually all those who follow the Vedāntic principles of the Upaniṣads—the supreme deity (e.g., Mahāviṣṇu) encompasses even the Trinity. Finally, in the case of Vaiṣṇavites (devotees of Viṣṇu), this supreme deity has been incarnated and thus given a wealth of personifying characteristics, as both a child and an adult. On the other hand, the ultimate unity of the divine in philosophical Hinduism is not so much a monotheism of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort as monism, an assertion that every soul is ultimately one in that divine being (who is, in this respect, commonly referred to as brahman). This division in personification is given a name in Hinduism—that between devotion to a deity “with properties” (saguna) or as absolute, thus “without properties” (nirguna; see Feuerstein 201-202 and 247-248).

This may at first appear to pose a problem. However, it fits the mystical analogy with romantic love perfectly. The longing of the bhakta for God in both Hindu and non-Hindu religious literature is not a longing to set up a home and have children, or to enjoy any worldly benefit. It is, rather, a longing to be one with the beloved, to be united in such a way as to overcome the sometimes unbearable isolation of being a conscious self. Mysticism could be conceived of as a sort of therapy for the existential loneliness of consciousness (a point I have discussed elsewhere; see chapter six of Personal Identity and Literature, and “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness”). As such, it is certainly not confined to monotheisms. However, the development of a carefully personified single, potentially all-encompassing deity may facilitate the literary development of mysticism.

Future Directions

The implications of all this for future research on universals of religious literature are fairly straightforward. Here are a few possible directives, based on the preceding analyses.

• Evaluate hypotheses 1-8 by reference to as wide a range of orally (as opposed to chirographically) maintained and local (as opposed to world) religions as possible. This may include further specifications of the hypotheses (e.g., as to whether the same sorts of goods are requested in petitionary prayer across cultures and whether there is any pattern when they diverge).
• Consider historical factors as well. I have treated the world religions almost as if they were timeless. That may work well enough for petition and praise (of which human beings never seem to tire). But the bhakti-based literature was not always a prominent part of religious literature; its proliferation occurred during certain periods. Why was that?
• Systematically examine the division between an emphasis on grace and an emphasis on individual effort, addressing its implications for the features and purposes of religious literature.
• Systematically consider if there is any necessary connection between bhakti-based literature and the sort of religious counterculture that is so evident in certain forms of Ṣūfism. More generally, we need further exploration of the political dimensions of bhakti and mysticism.
• Systematically explore the relation between religion and attachment, which seems to be virtually unconsidered. This might include such specific sub-topics as the place of bhakti-like literature in the Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah, which the preceding analysis suggests would be likely to include such literature.

Addendum. Rather on a whim, I decided I would take maybe an hour to see what I could find that bears on the final point about Kabbalah. Within about five minutes, I came upon a virtual treasure trove of mystical poetry of eros, due to Cole’s valuable collection. Like Christian, Muslim, and Hindu writers, many poets of this tradition do indeed draw on the model of romantic love to express and convey the poet’s devotion to God.

Works Cited

Abhinavagupta. Tantrasāra. Translation and commentaries by B. N. Pandit. Varanasi, India: Indian Mind, 2020.

Ali, Maulana Muḥammad. The Holy Qur’ān: Arabic Text, English Translation and Commentary. 2^nd ed. Columbus, OH Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, Inc., 1995.

Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Barrett, Justin. Cognitive Science, Religion, and Philosophy: From Human Minds to Divine Minds. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton P, 2011.

Bloom, Harold. The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011.

Cai, Zong-qi. “Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han.” How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang. Ed. Zong-qi Cai.New York: Columbia UP, 2018, 65-77. Kindle Edition.

Cole, Peter, ed. and trans. The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse of the Jewish Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012.

Davison, Scott A. “Petitionary Prayer.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available online at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/petitionary-prayer/ .

Dmitrieva, Victoria. “Foreword.” In Abhinavagupta, 7-18.

Feuerstein, Georg. The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000.

Fisher, Helen. “The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Selection.” In The New Psychology of Love.” Ed. Robert Sternberg and Karin Weis. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006, 87-115.

Gerstenberger, Erhard. “Petition and Praise: Basic Forms of Prayer in the Babylonian and Hebrew Tradition.” [“Altorientalische Gebetsliteratur: Form, außersprachlicher Kontext und interkulturelle Adaptionsprozesse.”] Die Welt des Orients 49.1 (2019), 81-94.

Grimes, John. A Concies Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English. Revised ed. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1996.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.5-6 (2004): 116-142.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Personal Identity and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Housden, Roger, ed. For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2009.

Jerusalem Bible, The. Ed. Alexander Jones. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

Leonard, J. “Introduction.” In Paradise Lost. Ed. J. Leonard. New York: Penguin, 2003, vi-xxxix.

Moody-Adams, Michele. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

O’Flaherty, Wendy, ed. and trans. The Rig Veda. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Pandit, B. N. History of Kashmir Saivism. Srinagar, Kashmir, India: Utpal Publications, 1989.

Pregadio, Fabrizio. “Religious Daoism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Available online at  https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/daoism-religion/ .

Waines, David. An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Mario Slugan, Queen Mary University of London 

David Bordwell passed away on 29 February 2024. I was aware that he had health difficulties as he missed a couple of recent Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image annual conferences – a society whose ethos he deeply inspired and for a few years presided over. But I clearly did not understand the gravity of the situation for I was dumbfounded when I heard the distressing news in a short email from Noël Carroll. Taken together, Bordwell and Carroll are undeniably two scholars who have contributed the most to film studies no longer being contests of who can produce more references to Althusser, Lacan or Freud, or who can offer a reinterpretation of this or that canonical work in a psychoanalytic, gender, or some other ideology critique key. We can only thank the minor gods of lucid writing in the humanities that the two found themselves at the same time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where in 1996 they co-edited Post-Theory – a volume which cleared the way for the research programme of film cognitivism. Next to the introductory essay on the then dominance of what is still known simply as Theory with a capital T (as the posthumously just published book by Frederic Jameson, another recently passed pre-eminent scholar, evinces), Bordwell’s contribution to the volume was a piece titled “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision” which introduced the notion of “contingent universals.”

Summarizing both Bordwell’s original account and Ted Nannicelli’s explanation of the concept in his contribution to the Literary Universals Project (available here), contingent universals are the underlying reasons for why a specific artistic technique is widely distributed and comprehensible. In other words, contingent universals are human practices that are at least widely distributed across cultures. Bordwell’s focal technique is shot/reverse shot and, underlying this, the practice of conversation which involves a face-to-face exchange and taking turns. It is this practice of conversation that is arguably widely spread across cultures, which then  explains why the editing structure which alternates two characters in relatively close shots to represent a conversation is so widely used and understood. While this might seem sensible, even self-evident, for the readers of the Literary Universals Project, during the heyday of Theory it was controversial, for at that time it was not uncommon to take even the recognition of verisimilar photographic images as culturally constructed. In such a context, positing contingent universals, thus moving away from purely nurture accounts of film comprehension, was a highly innovative move.

Of course, Bordwell’s towering influence on film studies had started much earlier and extends far beyond theory to include other two traditional branches of the discipline: history and criticism. Already in the late 1970s, together with his spouse Kristin Thompson, Bordwell published Film Art, the most widely used disciplinary textbook which taught thousands of students how to analyze film style, currently in its thirteenth edition and translated to more than a dozen languages. In mid-80s he authored Narration in the Fiction Film – a manifesto of cognitivist film theory – which introduced the then radical idea that for the model for how the viewer understands film we should look to the discipline of contemporary psychology, rather than early 20^th century psychoanalysis. Appearing in 1988, The Classical Hollywood Cinema another joint project with Thompson, with Janet Staiger contributing this time as well, has remained the fundamental work for understanding the means of production, their evolution, and the textual features of the Hollywood studio system. Film History, originally from 1994 and again co-authored with Thompson, now in its fifth edition, is to this very day one of the best introductions to film history and canonical national cinemas from the end of 19^th century to the beginning of the 21^st.    

I will not list many other books that he published (although I believe Making Meaning – a scathing critique of the schematic and run-of-the-mill practice of academic film interpretation – is as timely now as it was in 1989 and as applicable to literary scholarship as it is to film). Instead, I would like to devote the remaining words to what becomes clear to anybody who read many of the in-memoriam posts that appeared in the days after his demise and written by many of those who were lucky enough to be his students (and are now themselves notable academics)–how generous Bordwell was as both a colleague and teacher. Despite the disciplinary authority he exuded, in his interactions in the classroom or the conference room he was always attentive and positive towards other people’s ideas even when they clashed with his own. At the 2016 Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference at Cornell University, I had the good fortune of experiencing this generosity firsthand when after my presentation he approached me and said that he liked my points and found them convincing. Imagine that! You are a postgraduate student who is wrapping up their PhD and sending your job applications all over the place, and David Bordwell tells you that you have good ideas. (That will keep you inspired through a couple of dozen rejection letters.) While the experience was unique for me, this type of encouragement must have been habitual to him. This is yet another reason to appreciate the wide reach of Bordwell’s scholarship, one which, I dare say, is for film studies what shot/reverse shot is for film style.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

A few months ago, I served as one referee for Stephen Levinson’s excellent new book, The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. In this book and in earlier works, Levinson has been very critical of other linguists’—especially Noam Chomsky’s—claims about universals of language structure. In consequence, he is sometimes viewed as an anti-universalist, not entirely without reason (see, for example, chapter two of Irish). However, Levinson acknowledges the existence of cross-language patterns in language structure, at least of a statistical or implicational variety. (On statistical, implicational, and absolute universals, see “What Are Literary Universals?”) Admittedly, Levinson does not find such patterns particularly engaging or illuminating, but that seems to me largely a matter of personal taste, not anything entailed by his arguments. What is more important, he finds other universals of language to be quite significant, as well as consequential for our understanding of the origins of language and other important topics. Specifically, Levinson explores the idea that robust universals may be found in language usage or pragmatics. In examining these universals, he develops the relevant implications of such pragmatic principles as Gricean cooperation, along with more general affective and cognitive processes, such as empathy and Theory of Mind. (In his “cooperative principle,” Paul Grice famously articulated general rules that govern our production and interpretation of speech, but that go beyond strict logic. For example, suppose you say, “I haven’t seen Jones in a while,” and then I say, “The flu has been particularly virulent this year.” You will take me to be suggesting that Jones had the flu, not making some irrelevant comment.)  Specifically, Levinson recruits research on cooperation, etc., to formulate explanations of a range of absolute universals, such as conversational turn-taking. Moreover, his explanations do not address these universals at a merely general level. Rather, he enters into details, treating features of the processes in question, such as the precise timing of turn-taking.

Not long after I had read Levinson’s manuscript, I received an email from my friend, Bradley Irish. Brad was working on a book manuscript treating universalism and its status in the humanities and social sciences. Among other things, he told me that a number of linguists he had read or spoken with reported that most linguists no longer supported the idea of language universals. They attributed the sea-change in the discipline to an article by Evans and Levinson that appeared in the prestigious journal, Brain and Behavioral Sciences, in 2009. Brad wanted to get my opinion. I explained that I was not in a position to judge what most linguists currently believe, though when I spoke with colleagues in linguistics at the University of Connecticut, they vigorously disagreed with this characterization of their profession today.

In any event, I decided that I should read the article. In the usual format of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, there was a target article (by Evans and Levinson, in this case), followed by a number of rejoinders from prominent researchers in the field, followed by a response to the rejoinders. The article and rejoinders clearly raise issues relevant to the Literary Universals Project, specifically issues surrounding the identification of universals.

The first thing to say about the article is that, whatever one thinks of the specific arguments, it really should not be characterized as “anti-universalist,” though it is easy to see how readers might come away with that impression. In fact, Evans and Levinson, along with most of the commentators on their article, accept that view that there are recurring structures and processes across languages. As I have already suggested, Evans and Levinson accept universals primarily in the broad sense in which Joseph Greenberg used the term and which is also the sense in which it is used on this website. (On the other hand, Evans and Levinson clearly do not care for Greenberg’s terminology and would evidently prefer restricting the term, “universal,” to absolute universals.) For example, in the abstract for their article, they write that “there are significant recurrent patterns in organization” across languages (429). Thus, they are not disputing universality as such. Rather, they are disputing a particular set of claims about language universals—specifically, the claims that an innate Universal Grammar underlies all natural, human languages, yielding an extensive uniformity of principles across languages, principles that are almost entirely modular in the sense that they refer to language features without appeal to contextual or pragmatic functions, such as communication. In contrast, Evans and Levinson maintain that the “recurrent patterns” are tendential, rather than absolute, and that they are “better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition” (429). In other words, the object of their critical argument is not so much universalism as a certain sort of innatism, one that leads to extensive claims about absolute universals and restricts the possible explanations for those universals to innate, specifically linguistic structures and processes.

I am not at all certain that Evans and Levinson’s account is fully accurate with regard to Chomsky’s views on these topics, at the time or subsequently. (Chomsky is the main target of their criticisms.) However, I largely agree with their positive claims, as well as their methodological concerns. As to the latter, in On Interpretation (1996), I maintained that Chomsky’s innatism is not as parsimonious as possible and that at least some of the grammatical facts he seeks to explain by complex rules are themselves well-explained by locating language in its social, interactive context. Moreover, I maintained that the patterns Chomsky isolates are often not strict rules, but looser tendencies and preferences. In addition, I followed Hilary Putnam and others in arguing that language acquisition does not require a specialized, innate apparatus, but can draw on “generalized learning strategies” (see Putnam “The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’” and “What is Innate”). Specifically, my contention was that, in a variety of cases, both structure and acquisition could be understood by reference to communicative intent along with ordinary principles of rational inference.

I should stress that none of this is intended to be in any way dismissive of Chomsky’s work. In fact, I consider that work to be exemplary of scientific theorizing at its very best. Indeed, I find Chomsky’s analyses deeply insightful and clarifying, even when I end up disagreeing with them. The crucial point here is just that my claims are closely related to those of Evans and Levinson, but remain compatible with a robust universalism. Part of this relatedness includes the greater attention to statistical, domain-general, and communicative universals than would be found in Chomsky-type—or generativist–formalisms. This derives from the fact that the cross-language patterns claimed by different theories are themselves (somewhat) different. Most obviously, the nature of innately-specified universals is different from the nature of universals that are not innately specified. As I have repeatedly tried to stress in discussing universals with skeptics, “universal” does not mean or imply “innate as such”; for example, universals may arise from convergent development derived from responses to recurring social or physical problems. This is a point that should be obvious, but apparently is not—hence the need to repeat it.

On the other hand, the generativists make many extremely valuable observations and draw surprising, insightful inferences, which non-generativists need to take account of. This is clear in the generativist responses to Evans and Levinson’s article. These responses repeatedly criticize Evans and Levinson for taking superficial differences at face value, thereby failing to recognize sometimes non-obvious patterns that subsume the apparent differences. Whatever one thinks of any specific cases treated by generativists, the general point should be underscored, not only for linguistic universals, but for literary universals also. Indeed, the apparent self-evidence of cultural difference, as we might call it, is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the development of a scientific treatment of universals. An initial, spontaneous sense of alienation in the face of unfamiliar artifacts or practices commonly underwrites the dismissal of the universalist project right from the start, thereby barring even the most basic attempts at identifying possible, cross-cultural patterns.

It may be difficult for readers to imagine a relevant case where the prima facie foreignness of a practice conceals an underlying commonality, and I doubt that the examples from linguistics would prove very illuminating for students of literature. I will therefore try to clarify this issue with a brief example (selected and summarized from work in progress). I have maintained that one cross-culturally recurring story genre is defined by the protagonist’s goal of seeking some sort of personal retribution, usually outside the standard, social procedures for the punishment of crime (see Affective Narratology, 120-135). Such revenge narratives form a “minor” or less frequent genre, but they appear significantly in a range of traditions. I obviously cannot overview a variety of cases from different literary traditions here. However, a valuable way of approaching the issue of cross-cultural genres is by treating selected, prominent cases, what I refer to as paradigms. In the Western tradition, a work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is highly paradigmatic; indeed, it has received almost unparalleled attention and has been the object of almost unequalled praise. Though not nearly as revered as Hamlet, Ji Junxiang’s Great Revenge of the Zhao Orphan has a notable position in Chinese literary history, making it an appropriate work for comparison. For example, Shih-pe Wang notes that “Wang Guowei (1877-1927), the founding figure of the study of Chinese drama, proposed that the play should be considered one of the great tragedies of world literature” (127). In addition, it is one of the “most frequently performed Chinese plays on the world’s stages” and has appeared in numerous versions (127; see also Li 17-19). For our purposes, the important point here is that these two paradigmatic works are both instances of the revenge genre. Put crudely, even if there were few other revenge stories in either tradition, it would still be reasonable to see both traditions as significantly including this genre. (There is nothing comparable in language as such, and thus in the study of linguistic universals.) Other paradigmatic works treating revenge would include, in Japan, Chikamatsu’s Drum of the Waves of Horikawa and Zeami’s Atsumori; and, in Greece, Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, among others.

Revenge narratives are built out of a protagonist’s suffering some harm, in recompense for which he or she seeks to subject his or her (presumptively guilty) antagonist to equal or greater harm. The harm at issue often involves loss of status; it almost invariably involves attachment loss, either the death of a loved one or betrayal by a trusted companion (friend, spouse, or family member). Status harm, attachment loss, and personal betrayal are likely to elicit empathic anger on the part of the reader, often leading him or her to hope that the hero succeeds in snuffing out the unworthy life of the treacherous enemy. But, thematically, revenge narratives are frequently, perhaps usually, ambivalent. For one thing, the covert nature of the hero’s revenge leads to “collateral damage,” most obviously the accidental deaths of innocents. When the hero does manage to do in the right person, this may result in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. As Martha Nussbaum stresses about revenge in real life, in no case does it reverse the original harm (e.g., resurrecting the dead beloved); even at its best, it succeeds only in adding new injury (not even simple insult, but palpable suffering) to prior injury. These problems are brought out particularly by the contrast between revenge and the closely related criminal investigation genre, for it is precisely the absence of an (unbiased) criminal investigation that makes the faults of revenge so salient. The point is particularly clear in Aeschylus.

Readers familiar with Ji’s play (as well as Hamlet) will already have recognized that these plays share some of the prototypical characteristics just outlined. Fundamentally, both the orphan and Hamlet lose their father to a politically usurping enemy and both set out to slay that enemy. However, there are apparently some striking differences on other features I see as prototypical. Specifically, in keeping with the assumption that Chinese culture looks more favorably on revenge than does Western culture, one might interpret the Chinese play as having little ambivalence. Once he learns of the misdeeds of his enemy, the orphan is single-minded in his rage against that enemy. There is none of the waffling and delay that we find in Hamlet. Moreover, the revenge of the orphan does not lead to the deaths of any innocents, while Hamlet’s plot puts Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern—and, indirectly, Cordelia—into their graves prematurely. Indeed, we even find Hamlet setting up a sort of sting operation designed to provide him with concrete evidence of his uncle’s guilt—a sequence that immediately recalls the sorts of tactics associated with criminal investigations. Finally, Hamlet himself ends up dead, unlike the orphan. Given all this, it would be easy to read the two plays as very different, and as testifying to a stark, cultural difference between their societies.

But these superficial differences readily mislead us into missing some striking similarities in the two works. One problem is the cultural clichés that surround the plays. Despite a famous passage in the The Classic of Rites that urges revenge (1.70), there is ample evidence that opposition to revenge is equally culturally supported in Chinese tradition (see Cheng). There is also empirical evidence that Chinese people have ambivalent feelings about revenge (see the study reported in Huang). Moreover, while Hamlet is tasked with killing his uncle, the orphan must kill the man who is, in effect, his adoptive father. Ambivalence may not be explicit in the character who takes revenge (i.e., the orphan). However, the emotional complexity is clear in the larger thematic and affective development of the play. Conversely, Hamlet is arguably rather less ambivalent than we are inclined to assume. For example, he does not appear to have any affection for his uncle. Moreover, the well-known quandary of critics has been, “Why does Hamlet delay?” (see, for example, https://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/hamletfivereasons.html), which at least appears to suggest that the critics are in favor of the revenge and would like to see the prince get on with it.

The preceding points may, then, lead us to ask what it is that enables both plays to convey complex attitudes toward revenge. As to The Zhao Orphan, I have argued that the play is a sort of allegory appealing to Southern Sòng Dynasty loyalists to rise up against the alien, Yuán Dynasty rulers, taking revenge for the usurpation of the earlier, indigenous dynasty. If this interpretation is valid, then we can make sense of details of the play, such as the whole idea of making the orphan in effect into the adopted child of his enemy (see Hogan “Paradoxes”).

How, then, is this related to Hamlet? The relation is not readily ascertained by fixing on the superficial properties of the plays. It requires a recognition that both Hamlet and the Zhao orphan cannot in fact choose the impartial option of criminal investigation. The objectivity and fairness of criminal investigation are upheld by the integrity of the social institutions that engage in such investigation. The problem in these plays is that—literally in Hamlet, allegorically in The Zhao Orphan–the criminals themselves constitute the government. This results in a situation where the only possible outcome of criminal investigation is itself a doubling of the crime, as Hamlet or the orphan would inevitably be made a victim once again. (In addition, both plays do this by combining the revenge structure with the usurpation sequence of the heroic prototype, which is another striking commonality.)

As I hope this illustrates, the plays are not well characterized by Evans and Levinson’s celebratory affirmation of vast linguistic (here, by extension, literary) diversity. These plays are, instead, much better characterized by Mark Baker’s comment that, “each new language [literary work] I have studied presents both fascinating new examples of diversity and important new evidence that human languages [or literary genres] are all variations on the same theme[s].” (448).

I might summarize (and slightly extend) the preceding reflections as follows: There is a striking contrast today between two different approaches to linguistics, with implications for the study of literary universals. One group (which includes generativists) is concerned principally with the algorithmic generation of descriptions and explanations of language structure, formulated in terms of well-defined, fully explicit systems, often derived from mathematical models. The other is, roughly, humanistic in orientation and tends to stress the experiential plausibility of descriptions and explanations, drawing on less abstract models from biology, and focused on language function. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I tend to favor the explanations of the humanistic group—the emphasis on communication, the appeal to a range of contributory causal factors, and so on. However, I often see the rigorous descriptions undertaken by the mathematical group as more insightful and illuminating—as with, for example, their work to formulate the structure of languages in terms of principles and parameters. One aspect of this difference is that the humanists, it may be argued, considerably underestimate the extent of universals, taking superficial differences at face value; at the same time, the mathematical group tends to rely too heavily on innatism in explaining the universals. Students of literary universals have things to learn from both groups. However, the biases of most literary researchers today are clearly parallel with those of the humanistic group. For this reason, despite the fact that I tend to agree with the explanations offered by the humanistic group, I must say that students of literature have more to learn from the mathematical group. This includes learning to identify underlying commonalities across traditions—thus literary universals–especially those that are concealed by superficial differences.

Works Cited

Baker, Mark. “Language Universals: Abstract But Not Mythological.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 448-449.

Cheng, Anne. “Filial Piety with a Vengeance: The Tension Between Rites and Law in the Han.” Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, edited by Alan Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, RoutledgeCurzon 2004, pp. 29-43.

Classic of Rites, The. (禮記 [Lǐjì]). Trans. James Legge. Available at https://ctext.org/liji (accessed 12 April 2020).

Evans, Nicholas and Stephen Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 429-448.

Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. On Interpretation: Meaning and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zhào Orphan.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022, 134-43.

Huang, Jialing. “Loving Shuang Ju: Chinese Audiences’ Entertainment Experience of Retribution Narratives.”Psychology of Popular Media 13.3 (2023): 447-456.

Irish, Bradley. The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

Levinson, Stephen. The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

Li, Wai-yee. “Introduction.’ In The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama. Ed. C. T. Hiah, Wai-yee Li, and George Kao. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.

Nussbaum, Martha. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.

Putnam, Hilary. “The Innateness Hypothesis’ and Explanatory Models in Linguistics.” In Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975

Putnam, Hilary. “What is Innate and Why: Comments on the Debate.” In Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Ed. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980, 397-409.

Wang, Shih-pe. The Orphan of Zhao: The Meaning of Loyalty and Filiality. In How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology. New York: Columbia UP, 2022, 127-150.

LTERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde

This blog is a response to Patrick Hogan’s response to my valedictory lecture marking my retirement, ‘Why endings are better than beginnings’. This title was appropriate to the occasion, but not quite accurate, as the lecture was about the special affordances of endings, rather than a competition between beginnings and endings. Patrick develops an account of a particular kind of ending which might be universal (“Story Endings and Discourse Endings”).  In this blog, I explain and illustrate the two things I said in the lecture about endings. The first is that an ending is established as an outcome of an interpretation of the text; it is not an observer-independent fact about the text.  The second is that the ending of a text can exploit the audience’s prior knowledge of the text, because the ending (usually) comes at the end, and that this can give endings an emotional boost based on expectation and surprise, accompanied by the empathy we have developed for characters. These are simple and ontologically parsimonious proposals which require nothing other than ordinary psychology, and so should be universally available for writers and readers, though how endings are interpreted, and how they use prior knowledge, may differ cross-culturally.

I begin by explaining what I mean by saying that an ending is derived by interpretation. This proposal is in keeping with the account of literary form which I outlined in Language and Literary Structure, where I suggested that many kinds of literary form are not facts about a text but arise as interpretations of the text. In effect, these kinds of literary form – which include almost all kinds of literary form – are meanings of the text, pragmatically communicated.  The literary form is attributed to the text on the basis of evidence offered by the (author of the) text in context. This is the same as the way that all communicated meanings are attributed to the communicator, on the basis of evidence provided by the communicator in context. This follows from the ‘relevance theory’ of communication established by Sperber and Wilson, and it should be universal.  The idea that an ending is an interpretation of the text can be clarified by comparing endings with ‘lasts’ which are objective facts about a text.  The last word in Jane Eyre is ‘Jesus’, and this is a fact about the text. But where the ending of the novel is depends on the reader, with the ending likely to be located at the beginning of the final chapter with the statement “Reader, I married him.”  This makes sense as an ending both because it resolves the romantic plot of the narrative, but also because it restores the broken family of the beginning.  In contrast, the activities of St John Rivers (which occupy the end of the book) do not feel like the ending to the novel.  However, since endings are interpretations there is nothing stopping a reader from treating the description of his activities in fact as the ending of the novel, depending on whether the reader finds this part of the text to conclude one of the themes of the novel (I return to this below). It is worth noting that one of the reasons why an ending is best treated as an interpretation, that is, a kind of meaning, is that to a large extent it is the meaning of the preceding text which tells us where the ending is. If locating an ending depends on meaning, that strongly suggests that being an ending is also a type of meaning.

A ‘last’ is a fact about the text, but nevertheless the identification of the last can depend on how it is defined.  What, for example, is the last sentence in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela)?  These questions can be answered by making the question more precise.  Finnegans Wake ends in the middle of a sentence (which is then continued by returning to the beginning of the novel), so is this the last sentence, or is the last sentence the preceding completed sentence?  This is a matter of definition, not inference.  Hopscotch begins with an instruction from the author as to how to read the text, offering (at least) two options, which have different last sentences.  In one reading, the reader reads chapters in sequence and stops at chapter 56, so the last sentence of chapter 56 is, in this reading, the last sentence of the book.  In another reading, the reader reads chapters according to an out-of-order sequence, and in this reading the last sentence of chapter 131 or the last sentence of chapter 58 is the last sentence of the book. These are both ways of defining the last sentence, and a third is that the last sentence is the last sentence in the highest-numbered chapter 155 (which is under neither instruction the last to be read).  Again, finding the last is a matter of definition and instruction, not a matter of inference. Thus, it is possible to do interesting things with lasts but because they are fairly determinate, the possibilities are nowhere as rich as the possibilities of manipulating the ending.

The distinction between an ending and a last can be seen in the common phenomenon of making the ending not the last thing in the text.  Fairytales and folktales often have a ‘coda’ (Labov’s term) which comes after the narrative finishes, and reflects back on the narrative or connects it to our audience world.  Consider for example the story of the Demon of Ganish, in the Burushaski language and told by Jemadaar Imaam Yaar Bèg  to D.L.R. Lorimer in 1924, and published in his grammar.  In the story, a demon eats people and then a hero pegs her down into a boulder, thus putting her activities to an end; this is the ending of the story.  But then there are two more sentences, explaining that the boulder and the peg still exist and can be located still; these are the last part of the text, but not its ending.  Fairy stories which end “And they lived happily ever after” do the same thing: this sentence is not part of the ending of the story, but comes after it.  Texts sometimes provide a kind of post-ending coda by directly addressing their audience, after the narrative has finished: the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray liked ending his texts with ‘Goodbye’, and Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream asks the audience to applaud. Here the address to the audience might or might not be interpreted also as an ending. What counts as an ending is always a matter of interpretation, depending on the evidence provided by the text in its context, which can include a knowledge of the genre.

If endings depend on how the text is interpreted, then there are a great many possibilities for endings.  There can be one ending, or more than one ending, or no ending, depending on how the text is interpreted.  Perhaps Jane Eyre has two endings, depending on how we interpret St John Rivers’s place in the overall narrative. Relevant evidence comes from a reading of the novel where many of the characters are named after the elements of earth, air, water or fire;  this character has the distinction of being both fire – St John pronounced as ‘singe-in’ – and water, which perhaps gives him a special symbolic role, allowing his ending to be part of the book’s ending, if the book is interpreted as being about the four elements.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be interpreted as having four endings, one for each of the groups of characters, in sequence: the lovers, the mechanicals, the royals, the fairies.  Sometimes it is hard to find an ending in a text.  A friend described her experience of borrowing a novel from the library, getting to the last page and finding no ending, and assuming that there were some pages missing (and so, fruitlessly, borrowed another copy to check).  Some texts imply that the narrative sequence will come to an end after the last: in the penultimate chapter of To the Lighthouseonly Mr. Ramsay reaches the island and his children rise to follow him as the chapter ends, but by implication their ending/arrival will occur after the last words of the chapter. (This is also a novel which can be interpreted as having two distinct endings.) In some texts, involving live performance in particular, the empty space after the text has finished can be interpreted as the ending, such as a concert performance which ends with a silence, before the audience is allowed to clap, or The Sopranos which cuts to a long-held silent black screen at the end. 

How do we locate the ending in a text? The text provides us with evidence, and we also come to the text with prior knowledge.  So, we know that the ending is likely to be near the last but may not be the last, and if we know the genre we can predict sometimes where the ending will fall. In many kinds of text, the ending has a relation to the beginning, and so by knowing how the text began we can infer the presence of an ending. For example, in Propp’s schema for fairy tales, a narrative begins by the hero’s family being disrupted (for example by the father leaving home) and it ends when a family is constructed around the hero (for example by marriage).  This is one of the important pieces of evidence which we use to infer that ‘Reader, I married him.’ is the ending of Jane Eyre.  Some endings at the last quote the title of the text (because the title is also a beginning) to imply the ending of the text, as in ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ or The Crying of Lot 49. Or the text cycles back to the beginning as Finnegans Wake does.  It is worth noting that some texts explicitly discuss the fact that they have an ending (as The Truman Show does), and may tease the reader as to when the ending will come, and what it will be. Or the text may tell the reader at the beginning how it will end, as Slaughterhouse Five does, though with a prediction compromised by the disordered temporal structure of the text.  Endings are normally near the last part of the text, but it is also possible to find endings elsewhere in a text, including near the first part of the text: a novel or film which starts at the end of events and then recounts how we got there might be said to have an ending at the beginning (as in Sunset Boulevard), though perhaps this stretches the notion of ending too far, given that being near the last is one of the relevant kinds of evidence for the presence of an ending.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Poetic Closure offered one of the most extensively worked-out accounts of endings in poems, focusing in particular on the  reader’s experience of ‘closure’ at the ending. Smith notes that the form of the poem offers a clue as to the ending, by changing its form: she said that closure arises from “the terminal modification of a formal principle”. She focuses mainly on terminal modifications in the direction of greater regularity, but also acknowledges that the modification can also go in the direction of greater irregularity. Beyond poetry, we can also say that a text can use a change to tell us that it is ending: something different happens.  For example, a play or film may end with people dancing, when they have not previously danced (as in the films White Noise or Leon the Pig Farmer). It is worth noting that the recognition of a terminal modification also depends on inference. A change is something we infer about a text. Texts are too complex for ‘change’ to be just a fact about them: they constantly change, so what we are looking for is a significant change, an attribution which depends on interpretation.  Increased or decreased regularity must be established relative to some interpretative framework, and what is ‘different’ in a text depends on what we think the text has been before.  So, Smith’s terminal modification is not an irrefutable fact about a text but an interpretation of it.

What I have said here about endings should in principle be universal: that is, endings are always attributed to a text by inference rather than holding of the text as facts. The universal fact is that form is capable of holding of a text just by being inferred. But because inference depends on knowledge, including cultural knowledge and knowledge of literary genres, whether an ending is inferred, and what evidence cues the ending, is likely to vary between cultures.  The novel, a form which emerged in a particular cultural context, also developed a type of ending of its own, something Kermode discusses in The Sense of an Ending and Lodge in the last chapter of The Art of Fiction.  Readers of novels take this into account as context both when interpreting where the ending is and in expecting that there will be an ending.  Perhaps for some genres of texts, in some cultures, there is no convention that there will be an ending near the ‘last’ part of the text. Thus the presence of endings, and what kinds of endings there are, may all differ between literatures.

I turn now to a different aspect of endings, which exploits our universal human psychology and thus should also be universal. Endings are (usually) near the last part of a text, which means that if we have read the text all the way up to this point, by the time the ending arrives we have built up knowledge of characters and events. This knowledge can generate expectations as to what will happen at the end, and our knowledge of characters can produce empathy towards them which makes us care about what happens to them at the end.  Expectations can be met, which can be emotionally powerful.  Expectations can also be denied, which can also be emotionally powerful, particularly when we are surprised by an ending.  Expectations can also be met but before or after or slightly differently from what we expect: a combination of satisfaction and denial, again potentially emotionally satisfying.  (Huron’s Sweet Anticipation is a very nice account of expectation and emotion in music, which carries over to literature.)The combination of the manipulation of expectations with our empathy towards characters can also be emotionally powerful. 

In a text dependent on time, such as a piece of music or a film, a change in tempo at the end (a ‘terminal modification of a formal principle’) can produce a powerful effect.  I find this for example in Todd Haynes’s film Carol in which the final action is very slightly decelerated as Rooney Mara moves towards Cate Blanchett, and where the actors themselves become very still at the end (the slowing down of the action is made very salient by having extras walk across the image, clearly slowed down). A speeding up at the end can be found the end of Istvan Szabo’s Mephisto where the first world war is represented very rapidly, or the television series Six Feet Under when we see the future deaths of all the characters. These speedings up also feel like prolepsis, where we remain in the present and anticipate the future, another type of terminal modification which cues the ending. The denial of expectations can involve various kinds of ‘twist’.  Two of my favorite twists come in the endings of Borges ‘The Aleph’ and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (I won’t say what they are, to avoid spoilers).  Another kind of denial comes with the bathetic ending, the ending that ends not with a bang but a whimper: for some, King Lear ends like this. A common technique in approaching an ending is to interrupt the flow of the sequence, just before the ending comes.  The Burushaski story of the Demon of Ganish, mentioned earlier, is interrupted just before the final gesture of pegging the demon into a boulder, when the narrator stops to explain where the boulder came from.  This type of interruption resembles the technique which Labov and Waletzky identified as the ‘evaluation’ in oral narratives, an interruption just before the point of the story arrives; though this is not an ending, the technique of interrupting in order to cue something important is the same.  Note again that a lot of this is dependent on how we interpret the text, because what constitutes an interruption is a matter of interpretation, not just a fact about the text.  I think, for example, that we can treat the ending of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony as having an interruption of this kind.  The symphony shifts from D minor to D major towards the end, and the whole orchestra plays a sustained major chord while the timpani beat out a repeated pattern on A and D, then just before the end the whole orchestra cuts out and all we hear is the timpani playing three beats on A-D-A, now accompanied by the bass drum, and then the chord returns and the whole piece ends. That break in the texturally thick sound, leaving just the texturally thin but loud sound of the percussion, feels to me like an interruption, and has an extraordinarily powerful effect at the ending.

A connection between these is that they involve a change at the ending, either in form or in content. In narratives, the change may involve a change of place, sometimes crossing a saliently liminal zone, as when going in or out of a doorway, or down or up a staircase.  Consider for example the end of The Searchers, with its movements in and out of the doorway of the house. I once saw Ingmar Bergman’s production of A Doll’s House,  and though I knew it ended with Nora going ot of the door, I was astonished when Nora first walked down from the stage into the audience and then out through the auditorium door, crossing two liminalities. In the ending of The Truman Show, the hero Jim Carrey goes up a staircase and through a door into the world, and the heroine Natascha McElhone goes down a different staircase and out into the world. In changing locations, endings share a characteristic with beginnings, which can also involve a change of place, and for the same basic reason: we experience the world as divided into events, and event boundaries at the beginning and end can be marked by changes in location.  In interpreting a text as having a beginning and an ending, we may draw on our perception of the organization of events in the world (Radvansky and Zacks ).  One of the ways of changing place is to move from a narrow domain into a broader domain, as Adam and Eve do at the end of Paradise Lost, or Chief at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Calvin and Hobbes in the last frame of their cartoon strip, or more abstractly at the end of ‘Ozymandias’ as “the lone and level sands stretch far away”. In addition to signalling an event boundary, this type of ending also allows new anticipations and expectations to be formed at the end of the text, offering an ‘openness’ which some readers respond positively to.  Another type of change can be a shift to utter chaos, as at the end of ‘Dover Beach’ or the disintegration of language at the end of the songs ‘The big country’ (Talking Heads) or ‘White man in Hammersmith Palais’ (The Clash). 

All the techniques which can be used to manipulate our expectations of the ending are available in all languages and literatures. They depend on commonalities such as our experience of time, our building up of expectations, our empathy, and the fact that most of what we find in texts depends on universal principles of interpretation (i.e., a universal pragmatic theory such as relevance theory).

Works Cited

Fabb, Nigel. Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending.  2nd edition.  Oxford, 2000.

Labov, W. & J. Waletzky. “Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience.” In Helm, J. ed., Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Proceedings of the 1966 annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 12–44, 1967.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction.   London: Vintage, 2011.

Lorimer, D. L. R.  The Burushaski Language. Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 1935.

Radvansky, Gabriel A. and Jeffrey M. Zacks (Eds.) Event Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.