Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)

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 Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm?s role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre. This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism?s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic, Modern, and contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It 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 if not identity as such. Cover CRITICAL RHYTHM Title Copyright CONTENTS Introduction Rhythm’s Critiques Why Rhythm? What Is Called Rhythm? Sordello’s Pristine Pulpiness Body, Throng, Race The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and Histories of Rhythm Beat and Count The Rhythms of the English Dolnik How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper Picturing Rhythm Fictions of Rhythm Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds Sapphic Stanzas: How Can We Read the Rhythm? Rhythm and Affect in “Christabel” Acknowledgments List of Contributors Index This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, & lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism's most important, most vested, & perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force & an unstable concept. It is a key term through which romantic, modern, & contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering 19th-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, & sometimes racialized poetics 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.