Václav Paris

Václav Paris is Assistant Professor of English at the City College of New York, where he teaches modernism and comparative literature. He is currently working on a book about evolutionary theory and national narrative in the 1920s.

Contributions

Beginning Again with Modernist Epic

In his 1978 book, On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson famously claimed that “the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have." His idea, which has since given rise to a field of sociobiology called “Epic of Evolution,” is that human beings have a primal need for explanations of their existence and cosmic order, a need better served by evolutionary science than religion or literature.