Fordham University Press Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form (Verbal Arts: Studies in 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. Review 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. Author: Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania From 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 an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. His books include Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, The Pursuit of Signs, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Framing the Sign, The Literary in Theory, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, and Theory of the Lyric. He has also edited the collections, The Call of the Phoneme: Puns and the Foundation of Letters, Just Being Difficult: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (with Kevin Lamb), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (with Pheng Cheah), Structuralism: Critical Concepts, and Deconstruction: Critical Concepts. About the Author Ben Glaser is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. His books include Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, The Pursuit of Signs, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Framing the Sign, The Literary in Theory, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, and Theory of the Lyric. He has also edited the collections, The Call of the Phoneme: Puns and the Foundation of Letters, Just Being Difficult: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (with Kevin Lamb), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (with Pheng Cheah), Structuralism: Critical Concepts, and Deconstruction: Critical Concepts. 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). Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. His books include Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, The Pursuit of Signs, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Framing the Sign, The Literary in Theory, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, and Theory of the Lyric. He has also edited the collections, The Call of the Phoneme: Puns and the Foundation of Letters, Just Being Difficult: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (with Kevin Lamb), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict And