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), and Ryan Heuser (English) will present a 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’s Nausea, pointing to the traditional view that, rhythmically, prose is prose by avoiding meter. Indeed, for Saintsbury in A 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 transactions shall 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. We apply 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 the Relativized Anti-Metricality Hypothesis: namely, that meter is inscribed 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 the nineteenth 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 the twentieth 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.