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Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction Paperback – March 1, 2009
byWilliam Flesch(Author)
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WithComeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.
Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known.
Flesch has given us a book that is sure to claim a central place in the discussion of literature and the humanities.
- Print length264 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2009
- Dimensions6.14 x 0.66 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100674032284
- ISBN-13978-0674032286
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“I admired William Flesch’s examination of fiction and evolutionary biology, inComeuppance: Costly Signalling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, not least because Flesch, a young professor at Brandeis, is aware of the limits of the application of biology to aesthetics.”―James Wood,New Yorker blog
“Those who appreciate theories of fiction from such critics as Harold Bloom, Wayne C. Booth, E. M. Forster, and Northop Frye will find Flesch’s work a welcome addition to the literature. And those interested in the juxtaposition of literature and psychology will find this book a refreshing take on both disciplines.”―T. J. Haskell,Choice
“Comeuppance by William Flesch is a surprising excursus into what I might have thought an impossible project. What Flesch undertakes with skill and cunning is what might be called the conversion of sociobiology into its aesthetic analogs. By means of this transposition, we are given a surprisingly fresh account of the workings of high literature.”―Harold Bloom
“Flesch’s book is at once authoritative and flexible, intellectually adventurous and careful. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not learn from its arresting arguments or take pleasure in the freshness of its juxtapositions. This is a book of immense originality and energy. Flesch opens up―for literary critics of every persuasion―new ways of thinking about the books they love.”―Nick Halpern, author ofEveryday and Prophetic
“How lonely I feel when I’m angry. How clearly, deeply, learnedly and originally William Flesch, in this magisterial―yes, magisterial―work lights up the ways that I am never less alone with my anger than when it finds its way into literature. Drawing on texts I only thought I knew well, and on an array of science I only thought I could never know at all, Flesch redeems some of our most shameful affects―hate; the pleasure we take in the pain of others―as the very material of social charity and communion. I would name famous names to praise Flesch―Hazlitt, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Simmel―except that to do so would be to miss what matters most about this life forgiving work. For all his engagements with the genius of others, the genius of this book is really all his own.”―Jeff Nunokawa, Professor of English, Princeton University
“Deftly drawing on 40 years of research in evolutionary psychology, William Flesch sheds new light on heroes, villains, narrators, authors, and the art of narrative itself. Our fascination with narratives of all kinds, Flesch argues, is based on our evolved capacity to track the selfish, the selfless, and those who take it upon themselves to mete out punishment. In this wild romp through contemporary culture and western literature, we are treated to new insights into characters real and imagined, ranging from J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen, Ludwig Wittgenstein to the 9/11 hijackers, Homer’s Telemachus to Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, and the governess in James’sThe Turn of the Screw to the Bride inKill Bill.”―James Schwartz, author ofIn Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA
“Those who appreciate theories of fiction from such critics as Harold Bloom, Wayne C. Booth, E. M. Forster, and Northop Frye will find Flesch’s work a welcome addition to the literature. And those interested in the juxtaposition of literature and psychology will find this book a refreshing take on both disciplines.”―T. J. Haskell,Choice
“Comeuppance by William Flesch is a surprising excursus into what I might have thought an impossible project. What Flesch undertakes with skill and cunning is what might be called the conversion of sociobiology into its aesthetic analogs. By means of this transposition, we are given a surprisingly fresh account of the workings of high literature.”―Harold Bloom
“Flesch’s book is at once authoritative and flexible, intellectually adventurous and careful. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not learn from its arresting arguments or take pleasure in the freshness of its juxtapositions. This is a book of immense originality and energy. Flesch opens up―for literary critics of every persuasion―new ways of thinking about the books they love.”―Nick Halpern, author ofEveryday and Prophetic
“How lonely I feel when I’m angry. How clearly, deeply, learnedly and originally William Flesch, in this magisterial―yes, magisterial―work lights up the ways that I am never less alone with my anger than when it finds its way into literature. Drawing on texts I only thought I knew well, and on an array of science I only thought I could never know at all, Flesch redeems some of our most shameful affects―hate; the pleasure we take in the pain of others―as the very material of social charity and communion. I would name famous names to praise Flesch―Hazlitt, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Simmel―except that to do so would be to miss what matters most about this life forgiving work. For all his engagements with the genius of others, the genius of this book is really all his own.”―Jeff Nunokawa, Professor of English, Princeton University
“Deftly drawing on 40 years of research in evolutionary psychology, William Flesch sheds new light on heroes, villains, narrators, authors, and the art of narrative itself. Our fascination with narratives of all kinds, Flesch argues, is based on our evolved capacity to track the selfish, the selfless, and those who take it upon themselves to mete out punishment. In this wild romp through contemporary culture and western literature, we are treated to new insights into characters real and imagined, ranging from J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen, Ludwig Wittgenstein to the 9/11 hijackers, Homer’s Telemachus to Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, and the governess in James’sThe Turn of the Screw to the Bride inKill Bill.”―James Schwartz, author ofIn Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA
About the Author
William Flesch is Professor of English Literature at Brandeis University and author of Generosity and the Limits of Authority.
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press
- Publication date : March 1, 2009
- Language : English
- Print length : 264 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674032284
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674032286
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.66 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,594,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,753 inFiction Writing Reference (Books)
- #5,995 inAmerican Literature Criticism
- #8,535 inEvolution (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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4.6 out of 5 stars
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2009Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book is not for everyone. It's scholarly and gets technical at parts. It's heavily end-noted. And you may need at least a passing familiarity with evolutionary psychology (not to mention the works of Shakespeare) to get much out of it. It also wouldn't hurt to be familiar with the fine details of the controversy over adaptationist paradigms in biology. On this point, I was delighted to see that Stephen Jay Gould's arguments still have currency.
That said, "Comeuppance" was for me one of those books that actually changes the way you see the world, much the way Dawkins's "Self Gene" did when I read it about ten years ago. I am currently an English grad student, but with undergrad degrees in Anthropology and Psychology I like paradigms that are a little more scientific than the poststructuralism and new historicism that are rampant in the Humanities.
Flesch's theory is an extrapolation of the models for the evolution of cooperation devised by Axelrod and Sober and Wilson. In short, the way to get beyond the simple tit-for-tat exchanges of reciprocal altruism is to operate in a system where several players are watching each exchange and policing the participants. This monitoring of other people (even unrelated strangers) and assessing them to see if they are altruistic or selfish is an activity we engage in even with fictional characters. The reason we do this is that we want to signal our own altruism, our "strong reciprocity," to whomever is monitoring us. And the basis of such signals need not be actual individuals.
This is of course a crude summary of a much more nuanced theory, one that I am currently applying to Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," a story that doesn't seem like very good fodder for evolutionary theories of literature. [...]
Thank you William Flesch for giving me an alternative to the infinite regress of discursive descriptivism. - Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2010Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseI enjoyed reading this excellent academic argument on our evolutionary preference for certain stories and what this means about the essential nature of humans and our need for stories and literature.
A well written and complex book.
Dr Donald McMiken
Secrets of Writing Killer Essays & Reports: A manual for students and professionals
Top reviews from other countries
- gabrielReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2018
5.0 out of 5 starsOpens the hood of fiction
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseWhy do we care about stories we know didn't happen? There are many opinions around about what makes fiction work. Many formulas and "tricks of the trade" have been proposed with varying degrees of trustworthiness by all kinds of "experts".
But in Comeuppance we find a very different approach: Flesch builds from Evolutionary Psychology research results (cooperation, altruistic punishment, etc) to understand why we care about stories and how good stories work. This is not another collection of random opinions but carries the weight of one of the most important disciplines of modern science.
This is a wonderful book: mind-altering, incredibly nuanced and smart. And it does not reduce fiction to some toy version of itself, it builds up and illuminates the depth and recursive subtlety of the stories that move us the most.
You'll never read fiction or watch movies in the same way ever again.
