1 Literary Prehistory: The Origins and Psychology of Storytelling________________________________ Michelle Scalise Sugiyama Final draft; please do not cite without author’s permission Critical Approaches to Literature: Psychological. B. Evans (Ed.). Salem Press. Origins The origins of literature are an academic no-man’s-land. Literary study sidesteps the question by equating the emergence of literature with the emergence of the earliest written texts (e.g., The Epic of Gilgamesh). Psychology explores the cognitive foundations of literature (e.g., Schank 1990) but does not concern itself with the socio-ecological context in which it emerged. Cultural anthropology is chiefly interested in storytelling vis-s-vis ritual, worldview, and belief systems, and has thus tended to focus on myth. Classic and linguistic approaches focus on the metrics and other performative aspects of oral tradition (e.g., Lord 1960, Hymes 1981), while folklore tends to focus on comparatively recent oral storytelling traditions that managed to survive the transition to industrialized life (e.g., fairy tales, tall tales). Because of their tightly circumscribed foci, none of these disciplines is charged with addressing the origins of the behavior they study. In contrast, the study of art customarily begins with an examination of its prehistory—the forms that it took and the contexts in which it was