Critical Rhythm
The Poetics of a Literary Life Form
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
312 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 9
Edited by Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler
Contributions by Derek Attridge, Jonathan Culler, Ben Glaser, Simon Jarvis, David Nowell Smith, Haun Saussy, Tom Cable, Natalie Gerber, Virginia Jackson, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin and Yopie Prins
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
312 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 9
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
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
Ben Glaser is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism and The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, both from Cornell University Press, and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
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 Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Maeera Shreiber is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional | 11 months | The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |