1. The Idea of a Paleopoetics
1. The Rimbaud excerpts come from the two lettres du voyant: May 13, 1871, to Georges Izambard, and May 15, 1871, to Paul Demeny (Cornille and Rimbaud, 1997). The reference to T. S. Eliot comes from his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot, 1957).
2. W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), lines 9–12.
3. Hesiod, Theogony, lines 1–115; Ezekiel, chaps. 1–11; Federico García Lorca, “The Theory and Function of the Duende” (Allen and Tallman, 1974:91–103); Graves (1948); Rilke (1922/1965).
4. The Dickinson quote is from an 1870 letter she wrote to her sometime mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Alternately bemused and astonished by her statements, the abolitionist colonel and man of letters captioned this quote as a “crowning extravaganza.” It is collected in Mabel Loomis Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 315; the Ezra Pound quote is from “A Retrospect,” first published in Poetry 1, no. 6 (March 1913), reprinted in Allen and Tallman (1974:36–54); T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” first published in 1921, is reprinted in Eliot (1957).
5. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 110–20, 564–81, in Leaves of Grass, 1892 ed.
6. W. C. Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 1955, lines 313–26, in Williams (1966).
7. Rhetoric, as well as poetics, existed long before writing. Despite their use of notes and even teleprompters, public speakers still try to seem to be uttering their own spontaneous thoughts and feelings. Though the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero were written in advance and have since survived to be studied as gracefully constructed works of art, they were intended to seem skillful improvisations, and to that end they were committed to memory. Writing has allowed later generations to read and reread these monumental works of rhetorical art, but we would misread them if we did not recognize them as orally delivered reactions to unique political events.
8. Despite its title, Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias (De Interpretatione) is not about textual interpretation, but about semantics and logic. The Homeric allegorizers were principally Stoics and Neoplatonists. The commentators on Vergil were Servius, who composed line-by-line scholia of all the poems, and Tiberius Claudius Donatus, who wrote a general interpretation of the Aeneid for the benefit of his son.
9. In his comments on Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, David Miall (2005:134) notes on the very first page a “slippage in the key term ‘reading,’” as “reading” (action) becomes “a reading” (written explication). See also Miall (2006:41–42).
10. In a follow-up article in Poetics Today, Richard van Oort wrote in reference to “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution”: “Much of this cross-disciplinary work … has not produced the revolution in literary studies hoped for by its proponents. On the contrary, cognitively informed interpretations of various literary works seem for the most part content to apply the newly acquired terminology of cognitive science to the fundamentally old task of providing original interpretations of literary works. In this sense, cognitive poetics is new wine in old bottles” (“Cognitive Science and the Problem of Representation,” Richard van Oort, Poetics Today 24, no. 2 [Summer 2003]:237–95). To be fair, I would exempt Turner and Hernadi from my own criticism, since their articles were not intent on demonstrating the interpretive uses of cognitive poetics.
11. Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2002) exemplifies this tendency for, while it surveys current theoretical opinion with admirable thoroughness, it restricts itself to information-processing functions, introducing issues of imagination, simulation, and emotion only in its “last words” chapter.
12. His reference to “‘orthodox’ or ‘narrow-school’ EP” comes from “An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick,” posted on the Internet in response to Kramnick’s January 2011 article “Against Literary Darwinism,” which appeared in Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2:315–47. Brian Boyd (2012) in a further attempt to distance Literary Darwinism from EP has adopted the lowercase form, “ep,” to represent his brand of evolutionary psychology and has rechristened the movement “evocriticism.”
13. S. M. Coleridge, Biographia literaria, chap. 14.
2. From Dualities to Dyads
1. Sigmund Freud also recognized this as a problem, and though he interpreted their dynamics quite differently, his “primary” and “secondary process thought”—characterizing his Pleasure Principle and his Reality Principle, respectively—closely correspond to S1 and S2. Any conflict that might arise between the two systems should not be termed a “cognitive dissonance,” for, as Leon Festinger (1957) defined that principle, it would exist only between ideas or beliefs processed wholly within System 2.
2. If I could have found a term already applied to this concept, I would have used it. I imagine Arthur Koestler faced this quandary before he settled on “holon” (Ghost in the Machine, 1967). I had thought of “complementarity,” but for various reasons, including its length, I decided against it. The term currently used, especially in computational and robotic theory, for the combination of serial and parallel processes is “hybrid,” as in the “hybrid model of information processing,” but, to my mind, “hybrid” implies a blending or homogenizing of the two. I prefer “dyad,” because it retains the distinction between the two while integrating both in the performance of a single task. “Dyad” is often used to speak of the interaction of two persons (e.g., the “mother–child dyad”) but, of course, this is not how I am using this term.
3. A sizable body of evidence has now cast doubt on the assignment of these bones to the genus Homo, many authorities now calling him Australopithecus habilis, but no one doubts that he is a close link in the human lineage.
4. To illustrate how one sport, baseball, uses throwing, clubbing, and the two grips: The thrower always uses the precision grip, while the batter always uses a two-handed power grip, except in the act of bunting, when the dominant hand typically slides upward from the neck of the bat and holds the stock with the tips of the thumb and the first two fingers. Not only does the precision grip soften the impact of the ball, it also more accurately controls the placement of the bat.
5. This grip is still technically important. Michael Patkin has attested to the skillful uses of what he called the “double grip” in making surgical incisions and suturing (“The Hand Has Two Grips: An Aspect of Surgical Dexterity,” The Lancet [June 26, 1965] 1:1384–85). It is interesting to note that the word “surgery” derives from the Greek for “hand work,” cheirourgia.
6. As distinct as these two modes seem in definition, this distinction has proven somewhat problematical. Treisman and Gelade (1980) claimed that visual search used both in series (first parallel, then serial). Jeremy Wolfe (1998) argued that this distinction was unnecessary, since parallel and serial operations in visual search constituted a continuum. Haslam, Porter, and Rothschild (2001) tested Wolfe’s statistical experiments, found them wanting, and concluded that the two processes were indeed distinct and that, if a continuum could be found, it would have to accommodate that distinction.
7. “Enactive perception,” which alludes to a controversial idea that derives from James Gibson’s “ecological optics” (1979), was reintroduced by Alva Noë (2004) and critiqued by Jesse Prinz (2006).
8. Cf. William Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” in “Expostulation and Reply,” line 24, and Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens,” which Dainton’s meditation closely resembles.
9. Mammalian emotion has evolved as an “increasingly flexible adaptation to environmental contingencies by decoupling stimulus from response and thus creating a latency time for response optimization” (Scherer, 2001:92). Though Scherer stresses the sequentiality of this “checking” process, he acknowledges that, being “multilevel,” emotions may also be considered parallel processes.
1. “This,” he adds, “is the basis of Baldwin’s effect.” This effect, named for the philosopher and evolutionist James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934), is an adjustment of behavior that allows some individuals and communities to survive in the face of novel circumstances. It is a deliberate adaptation that preserves genetic variations in a given population.
2. With language emerges what Donald calls the “hybrid mind,” which is partly analog and partly symbolic (2001:155). The adjective “hybrid” here corresponds to what I have called “dyadic.” As for its genetic origin, Donald argues against the modular theories associated with Chomsky and Fodor. Calling his view “biocultural,” he places the “origin of language in cognitive communities, in the interconnected and distributed activity of many brains….” (2001:252).
3. In his response to the critics who say that, unless a child is old enough to explain in words that her behavior is pretense, we cannot assume it is, Leslie (1987) argues that if her behavior demonstrates that one object has been made to stand for another, “we have reason to believe that the child is pretending” (414). I am applying this commonsensical criterion to cats, dogs, otters, crows, etc.
4. Developmental psychologists, following Piaget’s lead, generally refer to the use of objects in pretend play appearing during the period 18–24 months as “symbolic play.” Since semiotic distinctions are critically important to my analysis, I find this use of “symbol” insufficiently precise since all it means is “sign.” When, later on, I speak of language in terms of symbolic signs and reintroduce the play principle, I will be concerned with the way arbitrary signs—true semiotic symbols—become the elements of human play. Accordingly, children’s play objects at this stage are almost always icons, e.g., banana for telephone.
5. According to the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, a thing functions as an index when a perceiver interprets it in relation to a real-world context. For example, if this thing is part of X or is a cause or effect of X, it can be used indexically to signify X. A thing functions as an icon when the perceiver regards it as a representation of X based on similarity and not on any contextual connection. A thing—e.g., a spoken or written word—functions as a symbol if its representation of X is based solely on mutual agreement or social convention.
6. For discussions of the mirror neuron system and its implications, see Stamenev and Gallese (2002), especially the articles by Fogassi and Gallese, Rizzolatti et al., Voegeley and Newen, Li and Hombert, Studdert-Kennedy, Stamenev, Bichakjian, and Morrison. Another valuable collection is Hurley and Chater (2005a), especially the separate articles by Gallese and Hurley. I will further discuss mirror neurons in later chapters.
7. To be precise, Donald (2001:260) estimates that the mimetic peaked in H. erectus 2–0.4 mya and was followed thereafter by the mythic stage of H. sapiens sapiens 0.5 mya–present.
8. This is not to say that Lower and Middle Paleolithic stone technology showed much innovation over time. It was remarkable less for its inventiveness than for its product standardization. Perhaps these early humans expressed their inventiveness in other materials or behaviors, but not in the style of their stone tools.
9. In regard to this object–instrument distinction, Napier would appear to agree that, when an object is grasped purposively and becomes a tool, it becomes an extension of the user’s central nervous system, which is firmly prewired for these, and only these two, grips (1980:905, 913).
10. Victor Egger, La Parole Intérieure: “… dans tout jeu, dans toute feinte, l’âme se dédouble, et l’acteur convaincu recouvre un spectateur sceptique…. [D]ans le jeu, d’une façon générale, le moi individuel s’affirme et se nie simultanément ou à des intervalles indiscernables…. Ce faisant, l’esprit ne croit pas se contredire: de cette affirmation et de cette négation il fait le synthèse, et de cette synthèse est l’idée même du jeu et du drame.”
4. The World as We See It
1. The numbers of degrees that appear in the literature of visual perception vary. The numbers I use are median estimates and should be considered approximate. Fortunately for my purposes, the variation is not a significant factor.
2. Michael Posner (1980) used a variation of it when he spoke of visual attention as a movable spotlight.
3. Thoreau, Journals, Sept. 13, 1852; June 14, 1854. For further “side of the eye” references, see also his entries for April 28 and 30, 1856 (Thoreau, 1962). Hermann von Helmholtz (Handbook of Physiological Optics, 1866) maintained that attention can be voluntarily shifted within the peripheral field, i.e., without directing focal vision onto an object. William James endorsed this view in The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (James, 1890/1950:435–39). See also Aristotle, Meteorologica, 1.6.
4. Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Thiere (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1921).
5. Needless to say, I am grossly simplifying the intricacy of the circuitry, e.g., the manner in which the information from the left and right hemisphere of each retina is distributed to both cerebral hemispheres, the function of the two lateral geniculate nuclei, and the processes performed by the various areas anterior to the primary visual center, V1.
6. This process of selection and recognition leads us to consider several further implications. The first is that, if selection must precede recognition sequentially, the processing that, up to this point, has been parallel now seems serial. This switchover suggests that knowing what is out there in the world can often require the sort of effort that only serial processing, albeit swiftly executed, can accomplish. For insight into the complexity of this issue, see Jean Bullier and Lionel G. Nowak (1995). Two other points are also worth considering. One is that Jeannerod and Jacob’s term “selection” introduces into neuroscience the concept of “figure and ground,” central to Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. The other is that “recognition” (or “object recognition”) reintroduces the Kantian concept of “apperception,” a principle of psychology that was generally uncontested from the mid-nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century. At least some of the “surmises” of philosophers and introspectionists, long scoffed at by the behaviorists and their allies, have now, it seems, been renamed and rehabilitated by a new generation of empiricists.
7. They determined the cognitive function of each stream by analyzing the visual capacity of patients who had lost the use of the other stream and then by applying the principle of “double dissociation.” That is, patients suffering from agnosia, like D. F., whose ventral stream was severely impaired, revealed the functions of the now neurally dissociated dorsal stream. Likewise, patients with an injured dorsal stream and suffering from optic ataxia revealed the inherent capacities of the ventral stream. In neither of such instances was there the possibility of crosstalk between streams. See Milner and Goodale, 1995:92–101, 120–47.
8. The literature on frames of reference includes a variety of synonymous terms: the allocentric frame has been called “object-to-object,” “world-centered,” “environment-centered,” “geocentric,” “intrinsic,” and “categorical”; the egocentric has been called “self-to-object,” “body-centered,” and “coordinate.”
9. The assignment of mental (or cognitive) mapping to the spatial frames has been somewhat controversial. Milner and Goodale (1995) flatly state that only allocentric coding could maintain a mental map (90–91). In a well received article Wang and Spelke (2002) held that viewpoint-dependent, spatially updated egocentric coding is all that is needed. Since the two streams, each with its own frame, must of necessity work simultaneously, I find Neil Burgess’s (2006) complementary model more convincing: “egocentric representations exist in parallel to (rather than instead of) allocentric ones.”
10. “Massive” is quite the attention-grabber, applied as it often is to catastrophic events such as earthquakes, firestorms, and heart attacks. Daniel Dennett was probably most responsible for popularizing it when he called the brain a “massively parallel processing machine” (Consciousness Explained [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 127). He was not the first to use it, though. The earliest usage I found dated from 1981, when it was applied to new computer technology.
11. “Pathway” was the preferred image for Ungerleider and Mishkin and for those who continued to speak of the dorsal as representing spatial perception (the “where?” pathway). “Stream,” which is now the more widely accepted usage, is associated with researchers such as Milner, Goodale, and Jeannerod. How ongoing research into the non-neuronal glial cells may affect the way we think of neurotransmission is not yet clear.
12. These transitive parts of consciousness are analogous to what Bohr called “quantum leaps,” events when an electron transits from one orbit around the nucleus of an atom, to another orbit. Like them also, these transitions in consciousness, according to James, cannot be observed without interfering with them. To try to do so is like trying to hold a snowflake, “seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas [light] quickly enough to see how the darkness looks” (James, 1890/1950:245), observations that anticipate the Uncertainty Principle later formulated by Bohr’s student, Werner Heisenberg.
5. Human Communication: From Pre-Language to Protolanguage
1. The main thesis of Dunbar’s 1996 book, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber & Faber), was that, as hominids came to live in communities far larger than their ape ancestors, the social obligation to groom all those they needed to bond with individually became too time-consuming, so the vocal soothing of several at a time took its place. Citing sociological data from a number of different cultures, Dunbar found that the average length of time that humans daily engage in gossip today roughly correlates to the time that great apes spend per day in grooming one another’s fur.
2. For a much more nuanced evaluation of the social function of ecological (object) information, see Kim Sterelny, “Social Intelligence, Human Intelligence and Niche Construction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2007):719–30. For an early assessment of Bickerton’s stance on language origins, see a review of his Language and Species by Michael Studdert-Kennedy (1991), who critiques Bickerton’s embrace of the “catastrophic theory” and his view of communication: “[I]nstead of treating the communicative and representational functions as mutually reinforcing components of a feedback system—the more you say, the more you have to say, and vice versa—he disregards the communicative function almost entirely” (259, 261).
3. Such was the conclusion that Philip Lieberman arrived at as early as 1971. Lieberman has always found improbable the notion of the sudden genetic mutation, a saltation, in which Homo sapiens sapiens acquired what Noam Chomsky called the human “language organ” and Stephen Pinker the “language instinct.” The Neanderthals, living cooperatively in small bands, probably had language of some sort, just not the sort that our direct ancestors had (Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press], 1984). The relation between the two species continues to be redefined: recent DNA analysis has found evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans may have interbred as early as 80,000 years ago when their populations met in the Middle East. If Caucasians prove to be genetically related to Homo neanderthalensis, this species did not become extinct, but rather merged with Homo sapiens sapiens, a fact that, no doubt, will have profound implications for the study of biological and cultural evolution. See Richard E. Green et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328, no. 5979 (May 7, 2010):710–22.
4. On abbreviation as a factor in the evolution of sign systems, see Brian Mac-Whinney, “The Gradual Emergence of Language,” 245 (in Givón and Malle, 2004); Robbins Burling, “Comprehension, Production, and Conventionalization in the Origins of Language,” 27–39 (in Knight et al., 2000); and Michael C. Corballis, “Did Language Evolve from Gestures?” 163–64 (in Wray, 2002b).
5. Michael Arbib (2009a) has accepted Wray’s theory as currently the most plausible model for a protolanguage, or as he calls it, “protospeech” (to balance the concept of “protosign,” i.e., gesture). Cf. Bronaslaw Malinowski’s notion of “phatic utterance.”
6. Common English usage preserves a special connection between signs and visual cognition. We “see” a sign and absorb the information it sets forth. Unless the context of our conversation happens to be semiotics, we never say we “hear” a sign. Instead, we “hear” a signal. Signals may be auditory or visual, but whatever their modality they are not messages to be pondered or perused: they carry simple meanings, often cues to immediate action. See Winfried Nöth (1995:111–12).
7. “Admittedly,” Deacon acknowledges, “this is not the way we typically use the term iconic, but I think it illuminates the most basic sense of the concept” (1997:75). In his review of the book, Richard Hudson (Journal of Pragmatics 33 [201]:129–35) remarks that “he seems to me to use ‘icon’ where other people simply talk of categorization” (130).
8. Chimps and bonobos can learn to point, once they have been enculturated by human caregivers, but they do not do so in the wild. It is interesting to note that these manually adept apes can make these indexical gestures but apparently have no need to do so in their natural habitats.
9. After discussing the role of “linguistic indexicals (e.g., that) and shifters (e.g., you)” as symbolic signs that point, Deacon (2003:134) comments: “It should not go unnoticed that this is consistent with arguments suggesting an evolutionary development of spoken language from ancestral forms that were entirely or partially manual.” Among those who should notice this diplomatically worded aside would presumably be Michael Arbib, Michael Corballis, and Robin Dunbar, whose articles appear in the same collection.
10. As a vocal medium, language exhibits both the weaknesses and strengths of a “short form.” Its phonemes and the words they construct are conventional features that rarely sound anything like their meanings (Hockett, 1960/1982). Speech is therefore inherently unclear, unless it is grounded in perceptual and conceptual contexts, i.e., the immediate setting of the speech event and the preestablished topic of the ongoing discourse. Once grounded, though, words prove to be extremely flexible means of communication. Their flexible ambiguity is the result of a “trade-off between two communicative pressures which are inherent to any communicative system: clarity and ease [cf. my “long” and “short form”]. A clear communication system is one in which the intended meaning can be recovered from the signal with high probability. An easy communication system is one in which signals are efficiently produced, communicated, and processed” (Piantadosi et al., 2012:281, authors’ emphasis). Wray and Grace’s (2007) protolanguage would accordingly be classified as an “easy,” or short form, system—esoteric, holistic, and formulaic. Their full language would be a “clear,” or long form, system—exoteric, syntactical, and compositional.
11. In brief, “exaptation” is the process by which a trait originally shaped by natural selection to serve one purpose is co-opted for a wholly new use. See Stephen J. Gould and Elizabeth Vrba, “Exaptation—A Missing Term in the Science of Form” (Gould and Vrba, 1982).
12. For the possible relation of the breathing and chewing cycles to the evolution of language, see Peter F. MacNeilage, “Whatever Happened to Articulate Speech?” (in Corballis and Lee, 1999:116–37).
13. The elbow, wrist, and opened hand motion he describes resembles a miniature act of throwing. On throwing as an evolutionary factor associated with pointing, see William Calvin (1993, 2004).
14. Our tendency to use visual clues (lip reading) to help process vocal speech has been explored by Harry McGurk and J. McDonald (1976). This phenomenon (the “McGurk Effect”) continues to intrigue speech scientists.
15. It is worth noting that Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (1754) anticipated Wray’s theory and my addendum: “It is reasonable to suppose that the words first made use of by mankind had a much more extensive signification than those used in languages already formed, and that ignorant as they were of the division of discourse into its constituent parts, they at first gave every single word the sense of a whole proposition. When they began to distinguish subject and attribute, and noun and verb, which was itself no common effort of genius, substantives were first only so many proper names” (Rousseau, 1754/1984, part 1, my emphasis).
6. Language: Its Prelinguistic Inheritance
1. Cf. André Martinet’s (1964) concept of “double articulation.” Hockett’s other three were displacement (the ability to refer to absent or imaginary objects), productivity (the ability to compose novel, yet comprehensible, statements), and traditional transmission (the ability to learn the special features of one’s native language). Hockett was careful not to make absolute claims as to the uniquely human character of two of these final four. For example, displacement is “apparently almost unique”—the bees do dances about absent flowers, though chimps do not communicate notions of absent entities (Hockett, 1960/1982:6). As for traditional transmission, he leaves open the possibility that gibbons’ calls may be “extragenetically” learned.
2. This form of play uses symbolic signs and needs therefore to be distinguished from what developmental psychologists refer to as “symbolic play,” which from a semiotic point of view might best be called either indexical or iconic play. When developmental psychologists speak of “symbolic play,” they refer to objects that children have imposed their own meanings on—the blanket that is a mother substitute (Winnicott) or the banana that is treated as a telephone (Leslie). As I’ve pointed out earlier, such objects are not semiotic symbols, but connote what Freud and Jung meant by the word, namely, subjectively charged (sometimes “cathected” and “overdetermined”) objects or images.
3. As the writings of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have revealed, the vocabulary of modern languages, and presumably of early, no-longer-available languages as well, are substantially formed through metonymic and metaphoric processes. That is to say, the meanings of most nouns and verbs derive from other words to which they are associated by contiguity (cause/effect or part/whole relation) or by similarity (shared properties or isomorphy).
4. I refer here to concrete, common, count nouns, which I take to be the earliest and still the basic-level designations for objects. I do not refer to mass nouns or abstract concepts, which I assume to be derivatives of count nouns.
5. I refer here, of course, to that class of prepositions that spatially locate objects relative to other objects, not to such conceptual prepositions as without, according to, because of, and except, etc., or to prepositions used as verb complements and infinitives. Saccadic suppression (or masking) was first reported by Raymond Dodge in 1900. For a somewhat fuller discussion of prepositions and imaging, see Collins, 1991a:115–18.
6. Primate visual perception is many millions of years older than language, but did language when it came along affect visual perception? Moreover, do separate languages determine how their speakers process visual information? (This is, of course, the linguistic relativism of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.) Or does the visual system that all humans have inherited explain why separate languages are similar? Though this debate continues, it seems that a reasonable answer to each debating team is a qualified “yes.” As Regier and Kay (2009) would have it, both are “half right.”
7. When Langacker and other cognitive linguists refer to visual perception, they often simply use the word “perception,” an understandable abbreviation, but one that implicitly excludes other sense modalities and tends to minimize phonology and audition as linguistic factors.
8. See Michael Arbib (2008) for a more extended discussion of this issue and a sharply reasoned critique of Gallese and Lakoff (2005).
9. Talmy is aware of Ungerleider and Mishkin’s (1982) findings on the two visual pathways, acknowledging that the “what” and “where” systems fit his two subsystems quite well, but he feels that structure, while broadly locational, relies on the structural representation of single objects, not just an “extended object array” (Talmy, 2000:167–68).
10. The authors of the last cited paper, an empirical study of spatial semantics, seem to have taken it for granted that Talmy could not have meant what he said about “observer-neutral” emanations, for they misinterpret his assessment of fictive motion as originating “in the ‘perceiver’ of the event who mentally ‘scans’ or ‘goes through’ that mental space” (Wallentin et al., 2005:222).
11. “From at least the time of Quintilian, ‘common places’ meant both the places the arguments were stored in and the arguments themselves” (Ong, 1982:110–11). In referring to topics as arguments stored in topoi, I follow that tradition. “Commonplace,” the adjective, has come to mean “trite,” because rhetorical overuse made the practice all too predictable.
7. The Poetics of the Verbal Artifact
1. “Semiotic constraints delimit the outside limits of the space of possibilities in which languages have evolved within our species, because they are the outside limits of the evolution of any symbolic form of communication. So perhaps the most astonishing implication of this hypothesis is that we should expect that many of the core universals expressed in human languages will of necessity be embodied in any symbolic communication system, even one used by an alien race on some distant planet!” (Deacon, 2003:138).
2. This ritual hypothesis for the social origins of the verbal artifact contrasts with the sexual selection hypothesis advanced in one form or another by Literary Darwinists. The latter argue that verse, as distinct from prose narrative, is a male strategem used to attract females who interpret it as an indicator of verbal cleverness. Like the peacock’s tail, a cumbersome extravagance that charms peahens while rendering the peacock vulnerable to predators, poetry, with its “extremely high tolerance for expressive nonsense” (Vermeule, 2012:429), is “merely what Daniel Dennett calls a ‘good trick’” (Boyd, 2012:401).
3. Robert Lowth (1710–1787) is credited with having first identified biblical parallelism as a poetic feature. Subsequent research has discovered that it is also a feature of Ugaritic poetry, composed in an older Semitic language related to Canaanite and Phoenician (Berlin, 1992).
4. In his article, Russo distinguished each type with a different form of underscoring. To simplify matters, I italicized his marked repetitions and used virgules to distinguish separate kinds of repetition. For his more particular textual analysis, I very much recommend the entire article.
5. Paivio’s theory is no longer considered current, but it was, early on, important to the research of Stephen Kosslyn and his colleagues. Paivio’s early opposition to the then influential modular theory of the mind and to the notion of a computational “mentalese” has proved justified in light of recent work on conceptualization and visuomotor simulation (Barsalou, 2009).
6. Tulving (2002), citing functional brain imaging research published in the 1990s, reported that during episodic encoding the left prefrontal cortex is principally involved, whereas during retrieval the right prefrontal cortex is activated. This suggested to him that the latter is involved in time travel back to the time and place of the encoding (17–18).
7. David Burrows has commented on the tendency, in song, of the music overriding the words. Examples of this include the “prolongation of vowel sounds, repetitions of certain words and phrases, introduction of rests all [of which] may stretch the normal time span for taking in sentences past the breaking point” (1990:88). In some performance traditions, as in post-Renaissance Western singing, this may be characterized as music cannibalizing its verbal partner, a case of “logophagia” (ibid.:87). In other traditions—e.g., plain song and Quranic recitation—the words and their phrasal structures are carefully articulated, with melody used only to heighten their effect. Related parlando styles are operatic recitativo, Sprechgesang, and Sprechstimme. In orally performed narrative, the voice carefully articulates the verbal message and if music, vocal and/or instrumental, accompanies the words, it functions as ground, not as figure.
8. See my Reading the Written Image (1991b:18–21) and Poetics of the Mind’s Eye (1991a:2–9).
9. This connection does not seem to have attracted much attention from classical scholars. Wray herself only mentions in passing the Parry-Lord theory (Wray, 2002a:75–76). But one young scholar, Chiara Bozzone (2010), taking a cognitive approach, has developed connections that other classicists should find well worth considering.
Epilogue: The Neopoetics of Writing
1. A (pre)history of tallies would, if written, have much to tell us of the origins of storytelling, I suspect, but for now it is enough to observe that many of our words for writing derive from words for making scratches, e.g., Gr. graphein, L. scribere, O.E. writan, O.H.G. rizan. This may simply mean that speech was first transcribed by scratching letters onto a surface, or it may mean that, once a pictographic, syllabic, or alphabetic system was invented, it seemed reasonable to consider it an extension of that long-established method of notation, tallying. Newfangled voice-transcription retained the old name, “scratching,” perhaps for the same reason that digital computing skill uses names such as “desktop,” “folders,” and “trash.”
2. Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam /vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? / inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, / hic elegos? Lines like these remind one nowadays of a stand-up comic’s routine—a very clever comic with attitude who writes his own material. The Theseid is apparently an epic poem featuring Theseus as hero. Note: we still refer to what a writer is “saying” and a writer’s readership as his or her “audience.”
3. “Period,” from peri + hodos, a pathway around, a circuit. For a discussion of a related stylistic issue raised by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, “written style” (lexis graphikê) as distinct from other rhetorical styles, see Graff, 2001. See also Collins, 1991a:68–76, 83–84, and 102.
4. My source is the 1917 translation provided by the Jewish Publication Society.
5. Plato, Republic 353c (kata phônên hê kata schêma). Epic was therefore classified as a mix of diegesis and mimesis—the “mixed mode.” Since subvocal mirroring of heard words facilitates a hearer’s understanding of them, we should add motor response to this mix.