ABSTRACT
This introduction discusses how Ethical Sense and Literary Significance blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to argue that the cultural agency of imaginative discourse is intimately linked to its ability to evoke and address a deep sociality characteristic of humans. At the heart of that sociality are tensions between what is felt to be significant for us, relevant to our organic and communal flourishing, and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Because these tensions are evolutionary legacies conditioning the felt experience of being human, they become matters of interest and deliberation everywhere. Verbal art that evokes, simulates, and elicits interactions between discursively indicated significance and ethical sense acts as a nonhuman interlocutor in diverse societies across many generations. By exploring relationships between literary signification and biocultural sociality, this study connects literary and cultural history in ways that draw on the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields, from classics to neuroscience, oral storytelling to phenomenological philosophy, comparative history to social psychology.
