Critical Rhythm

Helps us to better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts.

Contributor: Ben Glaser Ben Glaser is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. --- Contributor: Jonathan Culler 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). --- Contributor: Derek Attridge 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). --- Contributor: Jonathan Culler 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). --- Contributor: Ben Glaser Ben Glaser is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. --- Contributor: Simon Jarvis 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). --- Contributor: David Nowell Smith 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). --- Contributor: Haun Saussy 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. --- Contributor: Tom Cable 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. --- Contributor: Natalie Gerber 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. --- Contributor: Virginia Jackson 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. --- Contributor: Ewan Jones 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. --- Contributor: Erin Kappeler 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.” --- Contributor: Meredith Martin 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. --- Contributor: Yopie Prins 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.

“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, University of Pennsylvania