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

Christopher Collins

Published by Penn State University Press 1992

Reading the Written Image

Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia

Christopher Collins

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271071534

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 image: 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.

Author / Editor information

Collins Christopher :

Christopher Collins is Associate Professor of English at New York University and author of The Act of Poetry (1970), The Uses of Observation: Correspondential Vision in the Writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (1971), and The Poetics of the Mind's Eye (1991).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. LITERACY AND THE OPENING OF THE INNER EYE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. VISIONARY PLACES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
3. SCRIPTURE AND POIESIS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
4. EMPIRICISM AND INTERPRETIVE METHOD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
5. INTERPRETATION AND THE POETICS OF PERFORMANCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
6. THE POETIC FOCUS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
7. POETIC FAITH AND THE WRITTEN IMAGE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 206
Keywords: Christopher Collins; 0-271-00763; -X Comparative Literature Literary Theory Criticism; poiesis oral-dramatic poetic hermeneutic

eBook

Published: May 26, 2021
ISBN: 9780271071534