Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

by Christopher Collins

Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us.Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Born during the Great Depression, I grew up in a poor family in rural New Jersey. But, through a series of happy accidents, I did get a good education: BA from St. Anselm's, MA from the University of California at Berkeley, and finally, in 1964, a PhD from Columbia. I subsequently spent forty-five years teaching literature, mainly poetry, to college students. The last forty of those years I worked at New York University, where I taught a very wide range of courses from Shakespeare and Milton to Blake, Whitman, and Plath and designed my own seminars in what has become for me a special focus, the interaction of brain and language in the reading experience.

Since ‘90s I've written several books on this topic, including Reading the Written Image, The Poetics of The Mind’s Eye, and Authority Figures. This year (2013) Columbia University Press published Paleopoetics, a book in which I project the functions of imagination and language onto some 2.5 million years of human evolutionary time.

My wife and I have two children, two grandchildren, and two cats.

Reviews

[Angelina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long time ago, scholars agreed to quit talking about the origins of language because the theories were all impossible to prove and quite frankly, had ridiculous names: the bow-wow theory, the pooh-pooh theory, and the yo-heave-ho theory.

This book is an attempt to bring together what anthropologists, linguists, and paleontologists have discovered to create an over-arching theory of language development.

While obviously there was a need for the science to be included, I felt like I was reading a bunch of technical jargon for a bit, then the author would include a really clear analogy or metaphor and I'd catch up again. This cycle repeated the whole time, so I'm still not sure overall how much this book impacted my thinking because I'm still attempting to process all of the ideas.

[Amanda Witt]

Very detailed information about how early mankind developed language from signs. Part of the book is also devoted to how our mouth/brain linking occurred, enabling early speech to develop.