Ethics and Literary Worldmaking: Imaginative Discourse in Oral and Early Scribal Cultures

Considering poetry, narrative, and performances from diverse oral societies and the earliest scribal cultures, Ethics and Literary Worldmaking traces ways that both oral and written genres participate in communal shaping and reshaping of affectivity, sociality, deliberation, and evaluation. The study views delineation and revision of shared imagined “worlds” as itself an evolutionary adaptive activity, one through which humans, like other species, adjust behavior and modify their environments to enhance their flourishing.Donald R. Wehrs argues that discursive heritages of oral societies from Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas not only delineate diverse ontologies but also seek to negotiate tensions between individual desires and communal interests, and disjunctions between what seems socially or prudentially optimal and what is felt to be right or just.The earliest scribal traditions, Sumerian and Akkadian poetry, draw on patterns of ethically charged worldmaking resembling thos