[Prestidigitweeze]

My feeling is that the evolutionary model doesn't really work for the arts. In terms of levels or permanent traits, literary excellence isn't linked to any particular time period. In that sense, the plays of Aeschylus are more "evolved" than, say, the Twilight series.

Until the end of the modernist period, writers and critics often did view changes in style and form as evolutionary advancements. (Personally, I tend to view them as changes in fashion; as generational reactions or antonymic shifts. In which case romanticism vs. classicism isn't so different from romanticism vs. modernism.)

But with postmodernism, the idea of evolution seemed to give way to the simultaneity that Forster talked about in Aspects of the Novel: The idea that every novelist who ever lived is effectively writing in the same room at once.

By subscribing to the idea of evolution in the arts, we might be mistaking experimentalism and fashion for actual advancement.

Think of the modern attention span: It isn't an evolved version of attention spans in the past. We're not focusing on more important things than we were. We're being conditioned to shift our attention rapidly in ways that aren't always healthy neurologically.

If our brains were suddenly to split and allowed us to think several thoughts at once, and the purpose of that split was to help us adapt to the act of multitasking -- which for us is merely switching rapidly between two points of attention, but ideally would mean literally doing several things at once -- then I might regard that as an advancement in evolution.

In which case the media we read might evolve to accommodate our new talent for mental bifurcation, and we could say that literary content and form evolved along with us in the literal sense -- just as the printing press once did in the technological sense.