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Christopher Collins

Christopher Collins (born July 8, 1936) is a literary theorist specializing in cognitive poetics. Educated at St. Anselm College (summa cum laude), the University of California at Berkeley (Woodrow Wilson Fellow), and Columbia University where he received his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature (1964), Collins taught poetry and poetics in the Department of English at New York University (1968–2008) where he is currently professor emeritus.

In his research, Collins has concentrated on perception and memory as they are simulated in the act of reading, a line of inquiry that has led him to a number of adjacent disciplines, including the psychology of mental imaging, semiotics, cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, and the evolution of language. His earliest studies in the field of cognitive poetics were published in 1991, Reading the Written Image (Penn State Press) and The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye (University of Pennsylvania Press).

In 2004. he was invited to participate with Mark Turner and Per Aage Brandt at “Perspectives on Poetics and Textual Analysis in Cognitive Semiotics,” a four-day symposium sponsored by the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University, and held in Nexø, Bornholm (September 1-4, 2004). The three lectures he delivered there introduced the core concepts later proposed in “Palaeopoetics: Prefatory Notes Toward a Cognitive History of Poetry” (see Bibliography) and in his subsequent work.

In 2013, Columbia University Press published the first in a series of studies that take a yet broader interdisciplinary view of cognitive poetics. Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination traces the biological evolution of the imaginative skills requisite to the making and using of verbal artifacts, such as stories, songs, and rituals. These skills include play behavior, empathy, image and motor schemas, simulation, episodic memory, figure–ground perception, and distributed attention. Here his approach differs significantly from that of Literary Darwinism, associated with the work of Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, Denis Dutton, and Jonathan Gottschall. As Richard A. Richards, writing in the Quarterly Review of Biology, observes: “Many evolutionary accounts of the arts focus on the selective value and adaptive functioning of the arts, and neglect the mechanisms that make the arts possible.” Instead, Collins “focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that make possible poetic behavior. This is not a book about the advantages in survival and reproduction conferred by an art form, but about the deep, evolved cognitive structures that underlie imaginative literature.” Katja Mellmann in her review in the Journal of Literary Theory notes that “one of the great advantages of this book is that its guiding ideas, drawn from cognitive science, are not simply imported as authoritative knowledge but are presented in their respective research histories, including, when necessary, their controversial aspects . . . .” While recognizing the “wealth of ideas and new connections that Collins’s book presents in the broad flow of its closely interwoven research disciplines,” Mellmann takes exception to what she terms his “hyperconceptualization,” specifically his “dyadic theory” with its “overemphasis on the multiple duality or complementarity of cognitive processes as though behind this doubleness lay hidden its own essentiality.”

In 2016 appeared Neopoetics: The Evolution of Literate Imagination (Columbia University Press), a follow-up study that assesses the significance for verbal imagination of the cultural-evolutionary shift from an oral to a literate medium. As writing, over time, provided silent solitary reading as an alternative to public performance, the old oral genres became transformed, new literate genres emerged, and the reader’s capacity to simulate vision and voice was enhanced in order to actualize the mental performance of texts. As in his earlier publications, Neopoetics draws upon the findings of contemporary cognitive science to illuminate the reception of verbal compositions.

Bibliography.

Books:

Neopoetics: The Evolution of the Literate Imagination. Columbia University Press, 2016.

Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination. Columbia University Press, 2013.

Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007.

Authority Figures: Metaphors of Mastery from the Iliad to the Apocalypse. Rowman and Littlefield. 1996.

Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia. Pennsylvania State University Press. 1991.

The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination. University of Pennsylvania Press. 1991.

The Daphnis and Chloe of Longus. (Trans. and intro.) Imprint Society, 1972.

The Uses of Observation: Correspondential Vision in the Writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. De Gruyter Mouton, 1972.

The Act of Poetry. Random House, 1970.

Articles (selected):

“Animus Inscriptus: An Out-of-Body Embodiment?” Forthcoming in: E. Mocciaro & W. Short (eds.). The Embodied Basis of Constructions in Greek and Latin. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019.

“Il Primo Posto.” In How Do I Imagine Being There? ed. Claudia Losi. Milano: Humboldt Books, 2016, 18–21.

“Palaeopoetics: Prefatory Notes Toward a Cognitive History of Poetry.” In Cognitive Semiotics, Issue 2 (Spring, 2008), 41-64.

“Writing and the Nature of the Supernatural Image, or Why Ghosts Float.” In Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature, ed. Beate Allert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996, 242-260.

“Groundless Figures: Reader Response to Verbal Imagery.” The CEA Critic, 51.1 (1988), 11-29.

“Milton’s Early Cosmos and the Fall of Mulciber.” In Urbane Milton: The Latin Poetry, ed. J. A. Freeman and A. Low. (Milton Studies, XIX). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984, 37–52

“The Moving Eye in Williams’ Earlier Poetry.” In William Carlos Williams, Poet and Man, ed. Carroll F. Terrell. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1983, 261-285.

“Notes on Prosody.” In The Logic of Poetry, ed. Richard Monaco and John Briggs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974, 394-405.

“Figure, Ground, and Open Field.” New York Quarterly, no. 10, Winter,1972, 118-127.

References

Richards, Richard A.  Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination by Christopher Collins. 

The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 89, No. 4 (December 2014), pp. 410-411. Published by: The University of Chicago Press.

Mellmann, Katja.  2017.  “Paläopoetik und hermeneutisches Gehirn. Zwei beachtliche Beiträge im Bereich der Cognitive Poetics.” (Review of: Christopher Collins, Paleopoetics. The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination. New York, Columbia University Press 2013; Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain. The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press 2013.)  Journal of Literary Theory (JTonline) 28.04.2017. URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/reviews/article/view/895/2067

External Link: “Stranger Things (While Podcasting); or On Fear and Imagination,” a podcast sponsored by The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (UC San Diego) http://imagination.ucsd.edu/_wp/podcast/stranger-things-while-podcasting-or-on-fear-and-imagination/