{"id":479,"date":"2012-03-26T00:29:15","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T07:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=479"},"modified":"2012-03-26T00:31:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T07:31:01","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s1e12-we-care-about-everyone-with-william-flesch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=479","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E12: We Care About Everyone with William Flesch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction<\/em>. They discuss Jos\u00e9 Saramago’s way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don’t; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke’s scary Funny Games<\/em> viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke’s ludicrous Funny Games<\/em> viewed at home; what’s so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your villains, as with Hitler in Max<\/em> and The Boys from Brazil<\/em>; the perfect biological pitching of Onion<\/em>‘s 9\/11 headline “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell”; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray so gripping; our desire to feel we’ve misjudged characters; Buffy<\/em>, Angel<\/em>, and our bets about liking them; and characterization and reversion to type all the way from Shylock to Stewie Griffin.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture\u2019<\/em>s feed here<\/a> or on iTunes here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss Jos\u00e9 Saramago’s way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":484,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}