The Rise and Fall of Anti-Metricality
Speakers): Prof. Paul Kiparsky (Linguistics), Prof. Arto Tapani Anttila (Linguistics), Ryan Heuser (English), Scott Borgeson (Linguistics)
A team of scholars,Paul Kiparsky(Linguistics),Scott Borgeson(Linguistics),Arto Anttila(Linguistics), andRyan Heuser(English) will presenta paper titled"The Rise and Fall of Antimetricality."Kristin Hanson (Linguistics @ Berkeley) will offer a response. Followed by open discussion. A light dinner will be served.
Abstract:“Should we not, Monsieur, carefully avoid Alexandrines in prose?” So asks the Self-Taught Man in Sartre’sNausea, pointing to the traditional view that, rhythmically, prose is prose by avoiding meter. Indeed, for Saintsbury inA History of English Prose Rhythm(1912), the “great law” of prose is that “every syllable shall, as in poetry, ... be capable of entering into rhythmical transactions with its neighbours, but that these transactionsshall always stop short...of admitting the recurrent combinations proper to metre.” This paper traces such rhythmical tensions between prose and verse across English-language literary history. Weapply to a large corpus of prose and verse a set of new computational tools, which measure the extent to which the phonological features of written text can be mapped onto a metrical grid. Our goal is to test Saintsbury's "great law," along with a sharpened form of it which, drawing on Jakobson, we call theRelativized Anti-Metricality Hypothesis: namely, that meter isinscribed as a negative presence in the rhythms of literary prose of a given period to the extent that metrical verse is then the dominant literary form.On such a view, prose actively avoids metricality during the dominance of verse between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth (e.g. Browne, Addison); during this period, then, prose can be called “anti-metrical.” Then, in thenineteenth century, as the dominance of verse is eclipsed by the rise of the novel, literary prose starts to flirt with meter (e.g. Dickens, Ruskin), thus explicitly opposing its former mandate and becoming, instead, “anti-anti-metrical.” Finally, as metrical verse collapses in thetwentieth century and metricality as a rhythmic posture fades from literary view, prose abandons all relationship to meter, whether positive or negative, to become instead “a-metrical.”
Please contact melihle [at] stanford.edu (melihle[at]stanford[dot]edu) for the paper.