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This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland
in Synge's plays and performances. By dramatising a residual
culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish
Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge
attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to
be "modern" at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book
draws extensively on Synge's archive to demonstrate how
pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and
staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an
older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately
wanted to forget. Each of Synge's plays is considered in an
individual chapter, and they identify how Synge's dramaturgy was
informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore,
superstition and magical ritual.
This revised edition of the play is published alongside commentary
and notes by Christopher Collins, Assistant Professor of Drama at
the University of Nottingham, UK. It includes information for
today's students on the play's context; themes; dramatic devices;
production history; critical reception; academic debate; and ideas
for further study. It also includes interviews with practitioners
involved in major recent productions of the play. Described by J.M.
Synge as "a comedy, an extravaganza, made to use", The Playboy of
the Western World is one of the most iconic plays to have come out
of Ireland in the 20th century and is today recognised as a staple
of the dramatic canon. It is published as a new Student Edition,
which offers a 21st century lens on a play over 100 years old. When
it was first performed in 1907 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, Synge's
play provoked uproar and was interrupted more than once by the
police. Today, we recognise its importance in making Irish drama
the force it became in the early 20th century.
This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland
in Synge's plays and performances. By dramatising a residual
culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish
Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge
attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to
be "modern" at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book
draws extensively on Synge's archive to demonstrate how
pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and
staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an
older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately
wanted to forget. Each of Synge's plays is considered in an
individual chapter, and they identify how Synge's dramaturgy was
informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore,
superstition and magical ritual.
Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly
arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the
direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct
object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not
even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless,
languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured
and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language
universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the
central explanatory goals in the language sciences.
During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few
major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely
new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the
various language-science disciplines has made it more important
than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature
of human language universals. This book is the first to examine
language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It
provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What
exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there
universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they?
Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do
some universals require different kinds of explanations from
others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the
assumption that the best way to approach these and related
questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of
disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience,
philosophy, computer science and biology.
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.
Because every literary image is also a mental image, and because
every mental image is a representation of an absent entity,
Christopher Collins argues, imagination is a poiesis, a making-up,
an act of play for both author and reader. In a book that stands at
the intersection of poetic theory and cognitive psychology, Collins
considers the processes by which language mediates mental images to
make this play possible. The Poetics of the Mind's Eye examines the
relation of mind to eye, or of mental imagination to visual
perception. This work offers an analysis of the reading act that is
at once elegant and profound. It covers an enormous body of
material-from contemporary hermeneutics to studies in memory and
perception-and applies the resulting observations with brilliance
to a range of poetry, ancient and modern. The heart of the study
consists of Collins's original delineation and application of six
"cognitive modes" of reading: perception, retrospection, assertion,
introspection, expectation, and judgment. In addition, Collins
considers the impact of the movement from oral to print-literate
culture, examines the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
empirical philosophers on the nature and power of the imagination,
and explores the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century
literary theorists, linguists, and psychologists are heirs to this
empirical tradition. The Poetics of the Mind's Eye will be of
interest to students and scholars of literary theory and criticism.
'I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my
father in years gone by.' - Christy Mahon On the first night of J.
M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) the audience
began protesting in the theatre; by the third night the protests
had spilled onto the streets of Dublin. How did one play provoke
this? Christopher Collins addresses The Playboy 's satirical
treatment of illusion and realism in light of Ireland's struggle
for independence, as well as Synge's struggle for artistic
expression. By exploring Synge's unpublished diaries, drafts and
notebooks, he seeks to understand how and why the play came to be.
This volume invites the reader behind the scenes of this
inflammatory play and its first performances, to understand how and
why Synge risked everything in the name of art.
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.
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.
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