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

Includes bibliographical references and index.

One. Innovating ourselves. How we got this way ... -- Methods of mindsharing -- The coevolution of signs and technology -- From pronouns to speech acts -- Speaking to the mind's eye -- Summary -- Two. Narrative memory. Episodic memory -- The mnemonics of time -- Narrative time -- Magic and the mnemonics of place -- The mnemonics of person -- Summary -- Three. The dancing, singing daughters of memory. Memory and the mnemonics of performance -- The 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 -- The 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 -- The genealogy of the lyric voice -- The dramatic lyric -- The 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.

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.

In English.

Print version record.

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