Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia

by Christopher Collins

Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The "willing suspension of disbelief," which Coleridge said "constitutes poetic faith," therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated. Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 1991

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.