Contents

		Preface
		Some Notes on Dating and Nomenclature
		Acknowledgments
one		The Idea of a Paleopoetics
		Relitigating Plato v. Poiêsis
		Big History
		Rhetoric, Poetics, and Hermeneutics
		The Presymbolic Mind
		Symbolic Play and the Verbal Artifact
two		From Dualities to Dyads
		Duality
		Perception: The Parallel–Serial Dyad and Episodic Consciousness
		Action and the Anatomy of Multitasking
		Information Processing: The Parallel and Serial Modes
		The Dyadic Pattern
three		Play and Instrumentality
		Donald’s Four Stages of Consciousness
		Play in the Episodic Stage
		Instrumentality in the Mimetic Stage
		Imitative Play in the Mimetic Stage
		Preludes to Language
four		The World as We See It
		Vision and the Visual Imagination
		Parsing the Visible Umwelt
		Spatial Frames of Reference
		How Homo Became Sapient
		Complementarity—The Limits of Human Knowledge?
five		Human Communication: From Pre-Language to Protolanguage
		Why Language?
		From Pre-Language to Protolanguage and Beyond
		Gesture: Index and Icon
		Hearing Voices
		Protolanguage, the Long Transition
six		Language: Its Prelinguistic Inheritance
		The Rhetorical Motive
		Language Play
		Verbal Visuality: The Simulation of Perception
		Verbal Visuality: The Simulation of Action
		The Rhetorical Imagination
seven		The Poetics of the Verbal Artifact
		The Ritual and Poetic Genres
		Oral Performance Style
		Memory
		Enacting the Verbal Artifact
		Paralanguage, Protolanguage, and Oral Poetics
		Epilogue: The Neopoetics of Writing
		Notes
		Bibliography
		Index