Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form

by Ben Glaser Assistant Professor of English (Editor), Jonathan Culler Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Editor), Derek Attridge (Contribution by), Jonathan Culler Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Contribution by), Ben Glaser Assistant Professor of English (Contribution by)

Overview

This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it’s often assimilated—scansion, prosody, meter—rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory.

Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” the essays ask what it means to think rhythm.

Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other—two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts.

Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823282067
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Series:	Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Ben Glaser (Edited By)
Ben Glaser is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.

Jonathan Culler (Edited By)
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and the author of numerous books on literary theory, including Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. His most recent book is Theory of the Lyric (Harvard, 2015).


Derek Attridge is the author or editor of twenty-six books on literary theory, poetic form, South African literature, and the writings of James Joyce. His work on poetic form includes The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019), Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (2013), “Rhythm” in the new edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), Meter and Meaning (with Thomas Carper, 2003), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1996), and The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982).
Simon Jarvis is an independent writer and critic. He is the author of Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Adorno: a Critical Introduction (1998; reprinted, 2003), Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765 (1995) and the editor of Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2006), Rethinking Beauty, and a special issue of Diacritics (Spring 2002).
David Nowell Smith is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Creative Writing, and Drama at the University of East Anglia, and editor of the journal Thinking Verse. His books include Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (2013) and On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (2015).
Haun Saussy is University Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He won the René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature (for the second time) for his most recent book, Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Oxford, 2018). His book The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Fordham, 2016) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.
Thomas Cable is Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair Emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Meter and Melody of Beowulf (1974), The English Alliterative Tradition (1991), with Albert Baugh, and A History of the English Language, 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions (1978-2002). He has also co-edited The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry (1991) with R. Baltzer and J. Wimsatt.
Natalie Gerber is Associate Professor of English at State University of New York, Fredonia. She has recently published the following articles and book chapters: “Getting the Squiggly Tunes Down on the Page: Williams’ Triadic-Line Verse and American Intonation,” in Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams, “Intonation and the Conventions of Free Verse” (Style), “Stress-Based Metrics Revisited” (Thinking Verse), and an award winning article in the Wallace Stevens Journal on “Stevens’ Mixed-Breed Versifying.” She is also the editor of several special issues of the Wallace Stevens Journal.
Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, which won the Christian Gauss Award, and Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. She is also the editor of On Periodization: Selected Papers from the English Institute and The Lyric Theory Reader (with Yopie Prins). Her latest book, Before Modernism: The Invention of American Poetry, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Ewan Jones is University Lecturer in 19th Century English Literature, at University of Cambridge. He has published Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (2014) and has several forthcoming articles: “The Sonic Organization of ‘Kubla Khan,’” in Studies in Romanticism, “Pretty Vacant: Shelley’s Metrical Stops,” in Romantic Circles Praxis, and “Coventry Patmore’s Corpus,” in ELH. He is currently at work on a book on the historical development of the concept of rhythm in the 19th century.
Erin Kappeler is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri State University. Her articles include “Editing America: Nationalism and the New Poetry” (Modernism/Modernity) and “The Georgian Poets and the Genteel Tradition,” with Meredith Martin, in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry. She is working on a book manuscript entitled Shaping Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics 1880-1920 and the NEH-funded project “Everyday Laureates: Community Poetry in New England, 1865-1900.”
Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. She also directs the Princeton Prosody Archive, a full-text searchable database of materials about the study of poetry and language. She created and directs the Princeton Prosody Archive, a full-text searchable database of materials about the study of poetry and language. She wrote The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930, which won the MLA Prize for a First Book and the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism. Her current book project is titled Before We Were Disciplines.
Yopie Prins is Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017), and co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014) and Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (1997). She has another book in progress, Voice Inverse: Meter and Music in Victorian Poetry.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Ben Glaser, 1

Rhythm’s Critiques

Why Rhythm?
Jonathan Culler, 21

What Is Called Rhythm?
David Nowell Smith, 40

Sordello’s Pristine Pulpiness
Simon Jarvis, 60

Body, Throng, Race

The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics
Virginia Jackson, 87

Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body
Haun Saussy, 106

Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and Histories of Rhythm
Erin Kappeler, 128

Beat and Count

The Rhythms of the English Dolnik
Derek Attridge, 153

How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper
Thomas Cable, 174

Picturing Rhythm
Meredith Martin, 197

Fictions of Rhythm

Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds
Natalie Gerber, 223

Sapphic Stanzas: How Can We Read the Rhythm?
Yopie Prins 247

Rhythm and Affect in “Christabel”
Ewan Jones, 274

Acknowledgments 297

List of Contributors 299

Index 303

Editorial Reviews

What does it mean, and what has it meant historically, to participate in verse’s rhythmic patternings? This volume, with incandescent and defamiliarizing rhythms of its own, takes up rhythm as the central, ever-fugitive term in debates over sound and sense, the visible and the audible, the history of prosodic discourses, and methodological approaches to reading and performance. Reaching beyond the metrical constraints of foot prosody to powers of rhythm generally left underexplored in Anglo-American criticism, the formidable array of scholars gathered here opens up resonant inquiries into empirical, historical, ontological, phenomenological, and allegorical dimensions of rhythm in English-language verse of the past two centuries.”—Max Cavitch, Universityof Pennsylvania

From the Publisher

What does it mean, and what has it meant historically, to participate in verse’s rhythmic patternings? This volume, with incandescent and defamiliarizing rhythms of its own, takes up rhythm as the central, ever-fugitive term in debates over sound and sense, the visible and the audible, the history of prosodic discourses, and methodological approaches to reading and performance. Reaching beyond the metrical constraints of foot prosody to powers of rhythm generally left underexplored in Anglo-American criticism, the formidable array of scholars gathered here opens up resonant inquiries into empirical, historical, ontological, phenomenological, and allegorical dimensions of rhythm in English-language verse of the past two centuries.

Max Cavitch