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

Rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry, making 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 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. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique, the book asks what it means to think rhythm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823282050
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:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

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.


David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia.
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.

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