Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Record:   Prev Next
Resources
More Information
Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Collins, Christopher, author.

Title Neopoetics : the evolution of the literate imagination / Christopher Collins.

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]
©2017

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xxi, 320 pages)
text file PDF
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents One. Innovating ourselves. How we got this way... -- Methods of mindsharing -- Coevolution of signs and technology -- From pronouns to speech acts -- Speaking to the mind's eye -- Summary -- Two. Narrative memory. Episodic memory -- Mnemonics of time -- Narrative time -- Magic and the mnemonics of place -- Mnemonics of person -- Summary -- Three. Dancing, singing daughters of memory. Memory and the mnemonics of performance -- Coevolution of music and language -- Music and the emotional brain -- Dancing and the inner dance -- Individual differences and the pleasures of music -- Summary -- Four. Visual instruments of memory. Depicting the past -- Imagining the past -- Mnemonics of writing -- Public verse and the epitaph -- Private prose and the personal letter -- Summary -- Five. Poets' play and Plato's poetics. Enter the poet -- Word play -- Plato on poetic lies -- Plato and the imitative imagination -- Plato and the formation of genres -- Summary -- Six. Writing for the voice. Voces paginarum -- Genealogy of the lyric voice -- Dramatic lyric -- Epistolary lyric -- Voice and the afterlife of poets -- Summary -- Seven. Writing and the reading mind. Dyadic stylistics -- Reading inner writing -- Lyric and soliloquy -- What meter does -- Seeing what we read -- Summary -- Epilogue. Poetics and the making of the modern self.
Summary The quest to understand the evolution of the literary mind has become a fertile field of inquiry and speculation for scholars across literary studies and cognitive science. In Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins's acclaimed earlier title, he described how language emerged both as a communicative tool and as a means of fashioning other communicative tools-stories, songs, and rituals. In Neopoetics, Collins turns his attention to the cognitive evolution of the writing-ready brain. Further integrating neuroscience into the popular field of cognitive poetics, he adds empirical depth to our study of literary texts and verbal imagination and offers a whole new way to look at reading, writing, and creative expression. Collins begins Neopoetics with the early use of visual signs, first as reminders of narrative episodes and then as conventional symbols representing actual speech sounds. Next he examines the implications of written texts for the play of the auditory and visual imagination. To exemplify this long transition from oral to literate artistry, Collins examines a wide array of classical texts--from Homer and Hesiod to Plato and Aristotle and from the lyric innovations of Augustan Rome to the inner dialogues of St. Augustine. In this work of "big history," Collins demonstrates how biological and cultural evolution collaborated to shape both literature and the brain we use to read it.-- Provided by publisher.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Language In English.
Subject Semiotics.
Semiotics.
Visual pathways.
Visual pathways.
Language and languages -- Origin.
Language and languages -- Origin.
Poetry -- Psychological aspects.
Poetry -- Psychological aspects.
Poetics -- History -- To 1500.
Poetics.
History.
Chronological Term To 1500
Subject Evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary psychology.
Brain -- Evolution.
Brain -- Evolution.
Neurolinguistics.
Neurolinguistics.
Genre/Form History.
Electronic books.
Other Form: Print version: Collins, Christopher. Neopoetics. New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] 9780231176866 (DLC) 2016013378 (OCoLC)965735517
ISBN 9780231542883 (electronic book)
0231542887 (electronic book)
9780231176866 (cloth ; alkaline paper)
0231176864 (cloth ; alkaline paper)
Standard No. 10.7312/coll17686