Abstract
The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890; Sult) fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to be neurocomputational adaptations crafted by natural selection to help us get ahead as collaborators. But with societal transformation, these feelings can become a poor match for a new reality. Reprogramming oneself can be challenging; Hunger’s protagonist must suffer months of emotional and physical pain before he adapts. His journey, and Hamsun’s modernist project, can be illuminated by recent research on status management and morality as cooperation. As literature, Hunger could fulfill several adaptive functions by mapping morals for urban pro-sociality at a time of great disruption. Similar moral adaptation could become necessary in our present era, too.
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