Music, Rhythm, Language: A Special Issue from Representations
An interdisciplinary journal edited by renowned scholars, "Representations" publishes trend-setting articles and criticism in a wide variety of fields in the humanities. This special issue gives focus to music, rhythm, and language.
(PRWEB) November 18, 2004 -- In this new collection, available both in print and online, seven provocative essays consider the effects and historical traces of sound in literary works, from Virgil to modern French verse-by way of Schubert, familiar American hymns, and popular ballads.
The organizing topic-poetry-"flows through several fields, forming a passage, a right-of-way, between linguistics and performance, musicology and literary criticism," explains Katherine Bergeron in her introduction. "The authors collected here...raise common questions about voice and song; about writing and reading; about form and rhythm and sound. Yet it is not so much the commonalities as the differences of musical and literary production that inform their collective point of view. If a single awareness persists among the essays, it has something to do with the strange doubling of poetic language: not only its capacity to be remembered and reproduced, but also its capacity to be other to itself, to be there and not there at the same time."
The volume begins with an essay by Paul Alpers that asks, via a discussion of pastoral poetry, "What do we seek, in discussing a poem or other literary work, if not to make evident 'the implicit tie of intelligibility between speaker and listener'?" John Shoptaw answers by arguing for the importance of Emily Dickinsons rhythms to the intelligibility of her poems, while Katherine Bergeron investigates the meaning of timbre for Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and the French composers of their generation. David Code continues by looking closely at Mallarmés 1876 eclogue, LAprès-midi dune faune, illuminating structural rhythms that suggest ties to the great enfolded Poem that made up Mallarmé's unfinished Livre. Marshall Brown then takes up the difficult status of lyric utterance, in both music and poetry, and Ann Smock meditates on the work of contemporary French poet Jacques Roubaud, revisiting themes about the obliqueness of poetic form and the "absent flower" of poetrys music. In closing, Susan Stewart broadens the horizon of the poetic with an essay not about poetry but about Wuthering Heights, a novel saturated with the effects of the ballad, one of the oldest forms of folk poetry.
Together these essays synoptically register the sound of representative works in the Western tradition, both high and low, literary and musical. They reach beyond mere technical analysis to engage in contemporary debates about textuality, interpretation, and the ethics surrounding poetic language's "strange doubling."
Table of Contents:
- Katherine Bergeron, Introduction
- Paul Alpers, "The Philoctetes Problem" and the Poetics of Pastoral
- John Shoptaw, Listening to Dickinson
- Katherine Bergeron, A Bugle, A Bell, A Stroke of the Tongue: Rethinking Music in Modern French Verse
- David J. Code, The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmés Faun
- Marshall Brown, Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice
- Ann Smock, Cloudy Roubaud
- Susan Stewart, The Ballad in Wuthering Heights
About The University of California Press
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REPRESENTATIONS 86: Music, Rhythm, Language
Edited by Katherine Bergeron
University of California Press
197 pages, $12.00
ISSN: 0734-6018
General Information: http://www.representations.org
Full Text Online: http://caliber.ucpress.net/toc/rep/86/1
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