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Overview"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." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Christopher CollinsPublisher: Columbia University Press Imprint: Columbia University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.610kg ISBN: 9780231176866ISBN 10: 0231176864 Pages: 344 Publication Date: 29 November 2016 Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , General , Tertiary & Higher Education Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Language: English Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. Innovating Ourselves 2. Narrative Memory 3. The Dancing, Singing Daughters of Memory 4. Visual Instruments of Memory 5. Poets' Play and Plato's Poetics 6. Writing for the Voice 7. Writing and the Reading Mind Epilogue: Poetics and the Making of the Modern Self Appendix: Three Horatian Texts Notes Bibliography IndexReviewsChristopher Collins weaves the strands of cognitive poetics - neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics and semiotics - into a masterful work of scholarship on literacy, language, memory and the mind that itself reads as beautifully as a novel. This book calls out to be picked up and read carefully by anyone interested in how writing transformed the traditionally oral cultures of ancient Greece and Rome into literate and literary ones, and indeed helped define our own cultural evolution as human beings -- William Short, University of Texas, San Antonio The word poetics is rooted in the Greek poiein, to build or create. In his 2013 book, Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins assessed how evolution gave rise to the language-ready brain and its ability to create tools that extends our thoughts. Neopoetics carries his story forward to illuminate how writing has transformed the way that language supports mindsharing, performance and narrative. His exposition fruitfully augments the tools of literary analysis with well-judged perspectives from cognitive neuroscience in ways that extend to dance, music and emotion. -- Michael Arbib, University of Southern California Collins breathes new life into the the constructionist premise that language shapes how humans think. Using the literary traditions of ancient Greece and Rome to examine the constraints that oral and written media, respectively, impose on narrative representation, Neopoetics suggests new ways of thinking about the cognitive mechanisms that shape cultural transmission. -- Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, University or Oregon Author InformationChristopher Collins is professor emeritus of English at New York University. His many books include Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (Columbia, 2013); Authority Figures: Metaphors of Mastery from the Iliad to the Apocalypse (1996); The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (1991); and Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia (1991). Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |