Papers by Tom Dolack
ASEBL Journal, 2021
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Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2020
Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what ... more Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drastically since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasello indicates that the human conscience evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confession works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all.
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Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno, 2020
Miguel de Unamuno is an author who practically begs to be taught in a comparative context. A man ... more Miguel de Unamuno is an author who practically begs to be taught in a comparative context. A man of immense erudition, Unamuno read over a dozen languages, taught Classics, was familiar with the major literary and philosophical figures of his day and championed the culture of “minor” languages such as Basque and Portuguese. Unamuno’s understanding of what it was to be Spanish was inseparable from a world context. But his concept of what it was to be Spanish is central to his contribution to world literature and thought.
In this light I propose to discuss the teaching of Unamuno’s Niebla as the node in such an hour-glass figure where forms and philosophies from many different sources are brought together to create a new genre: the nivola. The nivola is characterized by an overturning of standard literary expectations and a reliance on dialogue, but in a way that points just as much to the future with its deconstruction of formal conventions as to the past, such as Plato’s dialogues and Cervantes’ Quijote.
I will draw on my own experience teaching Mist in a comparative literature course on the Existentialist novel that covered Dostoevsky, Rilke and Unamuno in addition to Malraux, Sartre, Camus and Beckett. In particular I will focus on ways of using the form of Unamuno’s novel as a way of getting students to understand the philosophy behind the novel—how dialogue underlies the individual’s search for meaning as opposed to an authorial dictate of a priori meaning—and how it differs from Unamuno’s precursors and anticipates the experiments of what would later come.
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Petrarch and His Legacies, 2021
Looking at Petrarch’s afterlife in Russia, it is surprising that a poet who was the predominant i... more Looking at Petrarch’s afterlife in Russia, it is surprising that a poet who was the predominant influence on European lyric poetry for centuries did not have a greater influence on Russian poetry. If literary predominance were a matter of intrinsic poetic quality, or of simple cultural quantity Petrarch would certainly have been more well-known and more widely imitated. In order to account for the lack of a distinctly Russian Petrarchism I first propose some reasons for Petrarch’s initial popularity based on recent work in the psychology of creativity and innovation.
From this perspective creativity and genius are not about the construction of something entirely novel, but are more a process of recombining what is old in a novel way within a particular cultural context. If this is the case, it should not be surprising that, formally speaking, the longest-running trend of modern poetry is characterized by an older form, the sonnet, used in a new way, the poetry collection, that allows for much variety (what is new) within a tightly-constrained formal structure (what is old). Thematically, Petrarchism is also characterized less by its pure originality than by its use of what already existed, the love tradition of the troubadours and the stilnovisti along with the more Christian ethic of the later Dante among others.
None of this would necessarily have been surprising to Petrarch and the other Humanists, whose practice of imitatio was of course based on the resurrection and following of older models. However, the following of an ancient model does not ipso facto mean literary success. First, appropriate models must be found, and then they must be followed in an appropriate way. “Appropriate” is naturally defined within a certain social, historical and cultural context, and this is what a psychological perspective can add to traditional studies of imitation.
In this light both the prolonged absence of Petrarch in Russia and the transformations that he underwent when he did arrive make more sense. There was no tradition of love poetry in 18th-century Russia and Neoclassical tastes elevated the epic and the ode over more “lyric” forms. When Petrarch was imitated, he was edited and transformed to match contemporary tastes. In other words he was the subject of the same process as in the rest of Europe and that he himself employed.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that what modern poets do is not in essence any different than the Renaissance practice of imitatio. All poetry is on some level imitation even though the theorizing around it has changed. Making this connection between Renaissance and modern practice allows us to better appreciate the central role of imitation in poetry.
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Evolution and Popular Narrative. Eds. Dirk Vanderbeke and Brett Cooke. Brill, 2019. 264-291., 2019
Many fields in the social sciences and humanities have recently been influenced by evolutionary t... more Many fields in the social sciences and humanities have recently been influenced by evolutionary theory and cognitive science. Of these, few have produced richer results than evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion. Researchers have established many different proposals for the origins of religious behavior and imagery. Dealing with the nature of symbolic narrative, this research is applicable to literary studies as well. Of particular interest are “minimally-counterintuitive concepts” or “minimally-counterintuitive imagery” (MCI), which combine elements from two or more ontological categories (such as people, animals, or inanimate objects). The predominant theory states that we make automatic assumptions about each category (people can speak while animals cannot, animals move on their own volition while plants do not, etc…) and that concepts that cross these boundaries are better remembered than other types of imagery.
Based on this work, I and a small team of undergraduates tried to test some implications of this theory empirically. For instance, there should be a difference in the prevalence of MCI in religious and non-religious texts and there should also be a difference between texts that are part of an oral tradition and those that are not. As a start to this project we compared the prevalence of counterintuitive imagery in two very different texts: the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter novels. Our initial conclusion, admittedly based on a small sample size of two works, is that neither assumption is correct. A work being religious and a work being told orally do not seem to mean that it will have a higher proportion of counterintuitive imagery. In fact, the Harry Potter novels contain a much higher percentage of MCI than the Hebrew Bible. These results are tentative as they need to be backed by a much broader examination of texts from different periods and different geographical locations, but they point to a need to reexamine the evolutionary purpose of minimally-counterintuitive concepts and perhaps of the relationship between early religion and narrative more broadly.
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Reasoning Beasts: Evolution, Cognition, and Culture, 1720–1820 Edited by Kathryn Duncan and Michael Austin, AMS Press, Inc. 2017, 2017
The founding of a national literary tradition is often shrouded in the myth of the lone genius. O... more The founding of a national literary tradition is often shrouded in the myth of the lone genius. One single, dominant figure is often seen as the touchstone for hundreds of years of subsequent literary production: Shakespeare in England, Goethe in Germany, Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain. Such figures created something new or different that set their respective traditions on a course towards their modern form. The greatness of these figures is often chalked up to something ineffable called genius, or is passed over in favor of finer-grain analysis. But the psychological study of creativity has advanced to a point where we no longer need to guess about the nature of literary production, but can base our assumptions on our knowledge of how our minds innovate.
Work in the cognitive and the decision sciences has confirmed an old assumption: that creativity is a matter of bringing together old ideas in a new way. Originality is doing something new with what is old. This is not just a metaphorical description, but what actually happens as inputs are present together within working memory. Indeed, this process is not unique to creativity, but is central to decision making in general. Literary genius is nothing more than something that everybody does constantly, but brought to an extreme pitch.
This view can show us how these figures were able to exert such an outsized influence on their culture. At an early stage of a tradition these figures are able to combine a constellation of sources into a product that is original enough that it is not classified as a copy of something else, but not so original that an audience cannot evaluate it in reference to what it already knows; that does not sound “foreign” or “antiquated” but is suited to the time and place in which it is written. This is accomplished through imitation, a process that is increasingly well understood from a psychological perspective.
Russia makes an ideal test case for this theory of emerging traditions. Russian literature has the advantages of having emerged recently for a major European tradition: the late 18th to the early 19th century; and of having matured quickly in the wake of massive European influence: essentially over a matter of decades. The Russian example recapitulates all of the stages of an emerging tradition, culminating in a major national figure, only in a more concentrated form. Beginning with the clumsy translations and imitations of Vasilii Trediakovskii in the mid-18th century, Russian literature steadily learned not just to copy, but to imitate, and finally to innovate by means of imitation. Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin can be seen as intermediate figures before the emergence of Alexander Pushkin in the first half of the nineteenth century. Pushkin solved the riddle of how to write specifically Russian literature, most notably in his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, precisely through this process of innovation through imitation.
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Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over, Aug 6, 2014
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Approaches to Teaching Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition. Eds. Christopher Kleinhenz and Andrea Dini. New York: MLA, 2014.
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ASEBL Journal 10.1, Jan 2014
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Translating Women, Jan 1, 2011
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politicsandculture.org
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Humanisms, posthumanisms, & neohumanisms, Jan 1, 2008
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Intersezioni, Jan 1, 2007
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Other by Tom Dolack
Literary Universals Project, 2019
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Presentations by Tom Dolack
Current state of group research project on Minimally Counterintuitive Imagery in a variety of tex... more Current state of group research project on Minimally Counterintuitive Imagery in a variety of texts. Cover attempts to quantify MCI, initial predictions of theory, and future direction of project.
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Book Reviews by Tom Dolack
The Russian Review 83 (2), 2024
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Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 6 (2), 2022
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Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 5 (2), 2021
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Papers by Tom Dolack
In this light I propose to discuss the teaching of Unamuno’s Niebla as the node in such an hour-glass figure where forms and philosophies from many different sources are brought together to create a new genre: the nivola. The nivola is characterized by an overturning of standard literary expectations and a reliance on dialogue, but in a way that points just as much to the future with its deconstruction of formal conventions as to the past, such as Plato’s dialogues and Cervantes’ Quijote.
I will draw on my own experience teaching Mist in a comparative literature course on the Existentialist novel that covered Dostoevsky, Rilke and Unamuno in addition to Malraux, Sartre, Camus and Beckett. In particular I will focus on ways of using the form of Unamuno’s novel as a way of getting students to understand the philosophy behind the novel—how dialogue underlies the individual’s search for meaning as opposed to an authorial dictate of a priori meaning—and how it differs from Unamuno’s precursors and anticipates the experiments of what would later come.
From this perspective creativity and genius are not about the construction of something entirely novel, but are more a process of recombining what is old in a novel way within a particular cultural context. If this is the case, it should not be surprising that, formally speaking, the longest-running trend of modern poetry is characterized by an older form, the sonnet, used in a new way, the poetry collection, that allows for much variety (what is new) within a tightly-constrained formal structure (what is old). Thematically, Petrarchism is also characterized less by its pure originality than by its use of what already existed, the love tradition of the troubadours and the stilnovisti along with the more Christian ethic of the later Dante among others.
None of this would necessarily have been surprising to Petrarch and the other Humanists, whose practice of imitatio was of course based on the resurrection and following of older models. However, the following of an ancient model does not ipso facto mean literary success. First, appropriate models must be found, and then they must be followed in an appropriate way. “Appropriate” is naturally defined within a certain social, historical and cultural context, and this is what a psychological perspective can add to traditional studies of imitation.
In this light both the prolonged absence of Petrarch in Russia and the transformations that he underwent when he did arrive make more sense. There was no tradition of love poetry in 18th-century Russia and Neoclassical tastes elevated the epic and the ode over more “lyric” forms. When Petrarch was imitated, he was edited and transformed to match contemporary tastes. In other words he was the subject of the same process as in the rest of Europe and that he himself employed.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that what modern poets do is not in essence any different than the Renaissance practice of imitatio. All poetry is on some level imitation even though the theorizing around it has changed. Making this connection between Renaissance and modern practice allows us to better appreciate the central role of imitation in poetry.
Based on this work, I and a small team of undergraduates tried to test some implications of this theory empirically. For instance, there should be a difference in the prevalence of MCI in religious and non-religious texts and there should also be a difference between texts that are part of an oral tradition and those that are not. As a start to this project we compared the prevalence of counterintuitive imagery in two very different texts: the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter novels. Our initial conclusion, admittedly based on a small sample size of two works, is that neither assumption is correct. A work being religious and a work being told orally do not seem to mean that it will have a higher proportion of counterintuitive imagery. In fact, the Harry Potter novels contain a much higher percentage of MCI than the Hebrew Bible. These results are tentative as they need to be backed by a much broader examination of texts from different periods and different geographical locations, but they point to a need to reexamine the evolutionary purpose of minimally-counterintuitive concepts and perhaps of the relationship between early religion and narrative more broadly.
Work in the cognitive and the decision sciences has confirmed an old assumption: that creativity is a matter of bringing together old ideas in a new way. Originality is doing something new with what is old. This is not just a metaphorical description, but what actually happens as inputs are present together within working memory. Indeed, this process is not unique to creativity, but is central to decision making in general. Literary genius is nothing more than something that everybody does constantly, but brought to an extreme pitch.
This view can show us how these figures were able to exert such an outsized influence on their culture. At an early stage of a tradition these figures are able to combine a constellation of sources into a product that is original enough that it is not classified as a copy of something else, but not so original that an audience cannot evaluate it in reference to what it already knows; that does not sound “foreign” or “antiquated” but is suited to the time and place in which it is written. This is accomplished through imitation, a process that is increasingly well understood from a psychological perspective.
Russia makes an ideal test case for this theory of emerging traditions. Russian literature has the advantages of having emerged recently for a major European tradition: the late 18th to the early 19th century; and of having matured quickly in the wake of massive European influence: essentially over a matter of decades. The Russian example recapitulates all of the stages of an emerging tradition, culminating in a major national figure, only in a more concentrated form. Beginning with the clumsy translations and imitations of Vasilii Trediakovskii in the mid-18th century, Russian literature steadily learned not just to copy, but to imitate, and finally to innovate by means of imitation. Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin can be seen as intermediate figures before the emergence of Alexander Pushkin in the first half of the nineteenth century. Pushkin solved the riddle of how to write specifically Russian literature, most notably in his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, precisely through this process of innovation through imitation.
Other by Tom Dolack
Presentations by Tom Dolack
Book Reviews by Tom Dolack
In this light I propose to discuss the teaching of Unamuno’s Niebla as the node in such an hour-glass figure where forms and philosophies from many different sources are brought together to create a new genre: the nivola. The nivola is characterized by an overturning of standard literary expectations and a reliance on dialogue, but in a way that points just as much to the future with its deconstruction of formal conventions as to the past, such as Plato’s dialogues and Cervantes’ Quijote.
I will draw on my own experience teaching Mist in a comparative literature course on the Existentialist novel that covered Dostoevsky, Rilke and Unamuno in addition to Malraux, Sartre, Camus and Beckett. In particular I will focus on ways of using the form of Unamuno’s novel as a way of getting students to understand the philosophy behind the novel—how dialogue underlies the individual’s search for meaning as opposed to an authorial dictate of a priori meaning—and how it differs from Unamuno’s precursors and anticipates the experiments of what would later come.
From this perspective creativity and genius are not about the construction of something entirely novel, but are more a process of recombining what is old in a novel way within a particular cultural context. If this is the case, it should not be surprising that, formally speaking, the longest-running trend of modern poetry is characterized by an older form, the sonnet, used in a new way, the poetry collection, that allows for much variety (what is new) within a tightly-constrained formal structure (what is old). Thematically, Petrarchism is also characterized less by its pure originality than by its use of what already existed, the love tradition of the troubadours and the stilnovisti along with the more Christian ethic of the later Dante among others.
None of this would necessarily have been surprising to Petrarch and the other Humanists, whose practice of imitatio was of course based on the resurrection and following of older models. However, the following of an ancient model does not ipso facto mean literary success. First, appropriate models must be found, and then they must be followed in an appropriate way. “Appropriate” is naturally defined within a certain social, historical and cultural context, and this is what a psychological perspective can add to traditional studies of imitation.
In this light both the prolonged absence of Petrarch in Russia and the transformations that he underwent when he did arrive make more sense. There was no tradition of love poetry in 18th-century Russia and Neoclassical tastes elevated the epic and the ode over more “lyric” forms. When Petrarch was imitated, he was edited and transformed to match contemporary tastes. In other words he was the subject of the same process as in the rest of Europe and that he himself employed.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that what modern poets do is not in essence any different than the Renaissance practice of imitatio. All poetry is on some level imitation even though the theorizing around it has changed. Making this connection between Renaissance and modern practice allows us to better appreciate the central role of imitation in poetry.
Based on this work, I and a small team of undergraduates tried to test some implications of this theory empirically. For instance, there should be a difference in the prevalence of MCI in religious and non-religious texts and there should also be a difference between texts that are part of an oral tradition and those that are not. As a start to this project we compared the prevalence of counterintuitive imagery in two very different texts: the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter novels. Our initial conclusion, admittedly based on a small sample size of two works, is that neither assumption is correct. A work being religious and a work being told orally do not seem to mean that it will have a higher proportion of counterintuitive imagery. In fact, the Harry Potter novels contain a much higher percentage of MCI than the Hebrew Bible. These results are tentative as they need to be backed by a much broader examination of texts from different periods and different geographical locations, but they point to a need to reexamine the evolutionary purpose of minimally-counterintuitive concepts and perhaps of the relationship between early religion and narrative more broadly.
Work in the cognitive and the decision sciences has confirmed an old assumption: that creativity is a matter of bringing together old ideas in a new way. Originality is doing something new with what is old. This is not just a metaphorical description, but what actually happens as inputs are present together within working memory. Indeed, this process is not unique to creativity, but is central to decision making in general. Literary genius is nothing more than something that everybody does constantly, but brought to an extreme pitch.
This view can show us how these figures were able to exert such an outsized influence on their culture. At an early stage of a tradition these figures are able to combine a constellation of sources into a product that is original enough that it is not classified as a copy of something else, but not so original that an audience cannot evaluate it in reference to what it already knows; that does not sound “foreign” or “antiquated” but is suited to the time and place in which it is written. This is accomplished through imitation, a process that is increasingly well understood from a psychological perspective.
Russia makes an ideal test case for this theory of emerging traditions. Russian literature has the advantages of having emerged recently for a major European tradition: the late 18th to the early 19th century; and of having matured quickly in the wake of massive European influence: essentially over a matter of decades. The Russian example recapitulates all of the stages of an emerging tradition, culminating in a major national figure, only in a more concentrated form. Beginning with the clumsy translations and imitations of Vasilii Trediakovskii in the mid-18th century, Russian literature steadily learned not just to copy, but to imitate, and finally to innovate by means of imitation. Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin can be seen as intermediate figures before the emergence of Alexander Pushkin in the first half of the nineteenth century. Pushkin solved the riddle of how to write specifically Russian literature, most notably in his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, precisely through this process of innovation through imitation.