Comparing Approaches to Versification Style in Cyrano De Bergerac
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
English 201 Major British Authors Harris Reading Guide: Forms There
English 201 Major British Authors Harris Reading Guide: Forms There are two general forms we will concern ourselves with: verse and prose. Verse is metered, prose is not. Poetry is a genre, or type (from the Latin genus, meaning kind or race; a category). Other genres include drama, fiction, biography, etc. POETRY. Poetry is described formally by its foot, line, and stanza. 1. Foot. Iambic, trochaic, dactylic, etc. 2. Line. Monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetramerter, Alexandrine, etc. 3. Stanza. Sonnet, ballad, elegy, sestet, couplet, etc. Each of these designations may give rise to a particular tradition; for example, the sonnet, which gives rise to famous sequences, such as those of Shakespeare. The following list is taken from entries in Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms (Univ. Press of New England, 1986). Acrostic. First letters of first lines read vertically spell something. Alcaic. (Greek) acephalous iamb, followed by two trochees and two dactyls (x2), then acephalous iamb and four trochees (x1), then two dactyls and two trochees. Alexandrine. A line of iambic hexameter. Ballad. Any meter, any rhyme; stanza usually a4b3c4b3. Think Bob Dylan. Ballade. French. Line usually 8-10 syllables; stanza of 28 lines, divided into 3 octaves and 1 quatrain, called the envoy. The last line of each stanza is the refrain. Versions include Ballade supreme, chant royal, and huitaine. Bob and Wheel. English form. Stanza is a quintet; the fifth line is enjambed, and is continued by the first line of the next stanza, usually shorter, which rhymes with lines 3 and 5. Example is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. -
On the Meter and Prosody of Frencii12-Syllable Verse
EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF THE ARTS, Vol. 10(2) 157-181, 1992 ONTHE METER AND PROSODY OF FRENCII12-SYLLABLE VERSE MARC DOMINICY Linguist/que generale Un/verslte Libre de Bruxelles ABSTRACT This article provides the reader with a survey of the basic metrical and prosodic properties of the French classical and post-classical 12-syllable alexandrine line. It is argued that these features can be captured within a neo-Jakobsonian framework which maintains a clear distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic parallelisms. Metrical equivalence is accounted for by positing abstract "line designs" that are linked to "line instances" by a set of "matching rules." The versification of Racine, Hugo, and late Nineteenth-century poets of the Parnassian and post-Parnassian generations is studied in some details. This makes it possible to evaluate the adequacy of recent theorizing by Benoit de Cornulier and Paul Verluyten. THE ESSENTIALS OF FRENCH VERSIFICATION: MASCULINE AND FEMININE LINES One of the major insights of Roman Jakobson's poetics [1-2, 4-10] is, no doubt, the assumption that any well-founded theory of verse should be based on a general study of parallelism. By reformulating this basic principle, I show that it is possible to give a description of the fundamentals of French verse. In order to make this discussion less abstract, I will use as an example one of the French poems which has frequently been commented upon by poeticians (see [3]), Baudelaire's "Les Chats": Les amoureux fervents et les savants austeres Aiment egalement, dans leur mare saison, Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison, Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sedentaires, 157 CJ 1992, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. -
Apollinaire's Verse Without Borders In
Bories, A-S 2019 Sex, Wine and Statelessness: Apollinaire’s Verse without Borders in ‘Vendémiaire’. Modern Languages Open, 2019(1): 14 pp. 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.221 ARTICLES – FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE Sex, Wine and Statelessness: Apollinaire’s Verse without Borders in ‘Vendémiaire’ Anne-Sophie Bories Universität Basel, CH [email protected] Guillaume Apollinaire is a perfect stateless European. Originally a subject of the Russian Empire, born Wilhelm Kostrowicky in Rome to a Finland-born, Polish-Italian single mother, later becoming a prominent French poet and a soldier and even- tually being granted much-desired French nationality, his biography reads like a novel. His 174-line poem ‘Vendémiaire’ (Alcools, 1913) is titled after the French Revolutionary Calendar’s windy month of grape harvest, and as such centres on wine. In this ‘chanson de Paris’, a personified Paris’ thirst for wine is met by the enthusiastic response of multiple towns and rivers, their water changed to wine, offering themselves to the capital in an orgy-like feast. This glorification of Apollinaire’s adoptive city mixes sexual double meanings with religious refer- ences, founding a half-parodic new religion. It also touches on the poet’s own painful strangeness, which leads him to dream of a liberated, borderless world of ‘universelle ivrognerie’, in which a godlike poet creates the world anew from primordial wine, and which also links to issues of national and cultural identities. This exceptionally dense poem, in which several meanings, tones and verse forms overlap, provides an exemplary specimen of Apollinaire’s daring versification, which bears an important role in the construction and circulation of meaning, and is foundational to his prominence as a modernist poet. -
A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER
A History of English Literature MICHAEL ALEXANDER [p. iv] © Michael Alexander 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1 P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 0-333-91397-3 hardcover ISBN 0-333-67226-7 paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 O1 00 Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts [p. v] Contents Acknowledgements The harvest of literacy Preface Further reading Abbreviations 2 Middle English Literature: 1066-1500 Introduction The new writing Literary history Handwriting -
Figure-Ground Backformed2
Reuven Tsur Metaphor and Figure–Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts Abstract The gestalt notion “figure–ground phenomenon” refers to the characteristic organisation of perception into a figure that ‘stands out’ against an undiffer- entiated background. What is figural at any one moment depends on patterns of sensory stimulation and on the momentary interests of the perceiver. Figure–ground relationship is an important element of the way we organise reality in our awareness, including works of art. Poets may rely on our ha- bitual figure–ground organisations in extra-linguistic reality to exploit our flexibility in shifting attention from one aspect to another so as to achieve certain poetic effects by inducing us to reverse the habitual figure–ground relationships. This flexibility has precedent in music and the visual arts. Works by Escher, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Dickinson, Sidney, Shelley, Beckett and Alterman are examined. Keywords: gestalt; metaphor; figure–ground; Emily Dickinson; P. B. Shelley; Sir Philip Sidney; Bach, Mozart; Beethoven; M. C. Escher; Samuel Beckett; Nathan Alterman; Gestalt Rules of Figure–Ground There was an old joke in Soviet Russia about a guard at the factory gate who at the end of every day saw a worker walking out with a wheelbarrow full of straw.1 Every day he thoroughly searched the contents of the wheelbarrow, but never found anything but straw. One day he asked the worker: “What do you gain by taking home all that straw?” “The wheelbarrows”. This paper is about the straw and the wheelbarrow, about shifting attention from figure to ground or, rather, about turning into figure what is usually perceived as ground. -
The Technique of the French Alexandrine; a Study of the Works Of
803m Mil X LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Received (JJ t^-.. Accession No. Class No. ...^y^JlJii.^ ^!Jol>rA4^ T^j THE TECHNIQUE OF THE French Alexandrine A STUDY OF THE WORKS OF LECONTE DE LISLE, JOSE MARIA DE HEREDIA, FRANCOIS COPPEE. SULLY PRUDHOMME, AND PAUL YERLAINE, DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE BOARD OF UNIVER- SITY STUDIES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVER- SITY. BALTIMORE, FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. BY HUGO PAUL THIEME. THE TECHNIQUE OF THE French Alexandrine A STUDY OF THE WORKS OF LECONTE DE LISLE, JOSE MARIA DE HEREDIA, FRANCOIS COPPEE. SULLY PRUDHOMME, AND PAUL YERLAINE, DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE BOARD OF UNIVER- SITY STUDIES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVER- SITY, BALTIMORE, FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. BY HUGO PAUL THIEME. TO DR. A. MARSHALL ELLIOTT THIS MONOGRAPH IS RESPECT- FULLY DEDICATED. 7 76-6-6' \A,VV^'' <J THE INLAND PRESS ANN ARBOR fo5 Iru ^3 z PREFACE As this monograph deals only with the technique of the a discussion of such French Alexandrine, questions, as, mute e^ verse accent, word-stress, etc., would be out of place. In the First Part I have endeavored to give a general presentation of the rules and principles of versification practiced by the Class- ical, Romantic, Parnassian and Symbolistic schools of poetry. In the body of examples I have shown to what extent these rules are followed by the five poets whose works have been examined. It would be out of the sphere of this work to discuss the occasional violations of these principles found in the verses examined, as those referring to the question of hemistich or cesura, rime, overflow, mute e, etc. -
Robert Marteau and the French Blank Alexandrine Thomas Pavel University of Chicago
Robert Marteau and the French Blank Alexandrine Thomas Pavel University of Chicago abstract: Thanks to the inspiringThree Thousand Years of Hebrews Versification: Essays in Comparative Prosody by Benjamin Harshav (Yale University Press, 2014) and in particular its first chapter, “Basic Aspects of Meter and Rhythm,” it is possible to take a fresh look at the history of French verse and its elusive relations between meter, rhythm, and poetic breath. In this essay I will examine the features of the rhymed alexandrine (the classical type of French verse), the various attempts to go beyond its limits, and the recent creation of a blank alexandrine, which blends rhythmic balance with ample phrasing and syntactic scope. he feature of french that has exercised the strongest influence on classical verse is the fixed stress on a word’s last voiced vowel. In English, in German, and in Russian, stress can fall on the first, the middle, or the last syllable of a word—for example, mother, Tcontiguous, assign in English (bold type indicates the stressed syllable). In French, by contrast, the stress always falls on the last syllable of a word when its vowel is voiced (garçon, brevet), this last syllable being unstressed only when its vowel is silent (repère, aigle). Although present-day pronunciation tends to elide silent vowels (voyelles muettes), they were audible in classical French versification, which defined the verse by the number of syllables it contained, the silent ones included. Thus, the alexandrine, which was the most frequently used type -
Sound Effects
684 REVIEW SOUND EFFECTS John Shoptaw Reuven Tsur. What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. xi + 174 pages. $32. 50. Burton Raffel. From Stress to Stress: An Autobiography of English Prosody. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1992. xxi + 185 pages. $27. 50. he poet Louis Zukofsky once formulated his poetics as "An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music" (A [U of California P, 1978] 138). Zukof- sky's formulation suggests a set of problems for poetry readers. How do we find the area under poetry's curve? How, for instance, do we integrate the meaning of speech with the music of verse? How, to speak in terms of disciplines, do we integrate linguistic research into poetry criticism? And how, historically speaking, do we derive prosodic theory from poetic practice? Two accomplished readers and professors of poetry, Burton Raffel and Reuven Tsur, perform their integrations using widely different methods. While both authors have something to teach us about hearing and reading poetry, both have chosen presentations that hinder, in different ways and to differing degrees, the usefulness and even the readability of their work. Burton Raffel, who is perhaps best known as a poetry editor and translator, offers his book as a refreshing departure from prosodic theory, which he claims rides roughshod over actual poems. It is indeed refreshing to see a prosodist lengthen his field of study from Old English to contemporary poems, which may be non-metrical but are nevertheless musical. His reticence to interfere with the prosody poets themselves create is signaled by his subtitle, An Autobiography of English Prosody. -
Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry Op Phillis Wheatley
SOME LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF THE HEROIC COUPLET IN THE POETRY OP PHILLIS WHEATLEY APPROVED: Graduate Committee; Major Profess Co Lttee Member) ColmLttee Membe -J- . nirecf^F~of G r aHuli t e^STu d"l es"*Ti;T~E n g 1 i sh " Sean of the Graduate Schoo1 Holder, Kenneth R., Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August, .1973, 288 pp., 8 tables, bibliography, 69 titles, This dissertation is an examination of the charac- teristics of Phillis Wheatley1s couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis em- ploys Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). The findings in these three areas are compared with the characteristics of a representative sample of the works of Alexander Pope, the poet who sup- posedly exerted a strong influence on Wheatley, a black eighteenth century American poet. Metrically, Wheatleyfs poems have a very low complexity rating. The mean number of Kalle-Keyser correspondence violations per line is 1.9. She rigorously adheres to the standard ten-syllable line, making frequent use of elision to attain this syllable count. The initial trochee is a 2 frequent variation of the Iambic stress pattern and the caesura expectedly appears after the fourth,, fifth, or sixth syllable in the vast majority of her lines. -
FRENCH VERSIFICATION: Z Lbid,, Pp
MAI,COI,M BOWIE N OTES APPENDIX | (Eturcs co,Hl)lètes (Paris, r945), pp.666-79 ancl 68o-6. FRENCH VERSIFICATION: z lbid,, pp. 666-7, A SUMMARY 1 lbid., p. 67r. 4 lbid., p. 67L. 5 G.W.F. I{egel, "fhe Phenomenology of Spirit, traus. A, V. Miller Cliue Scott (Oxforcl, r977), p. z4r, (All examples ir this appendix are clrawn fr.rn rinereenth-century verse and, rvhenever possible, frorn the poeurs anaryseci in the body of ,rr.î.,"k1. The regular alexandrine Ainsi,/toujours poussés//vers de nouveaux/rivagcs, z+ 4+ 4-l z Dans la nuit/éternelle//ernportés/sans retour, 3+1+1+3 Ne pourrons-nous/jamais//sur I'océan/cles âges 4+2+4+z Jeter I'tncre/un seul jour? 3'F 3 The sta'z¿rs of Lamartine's'r-e [.ac'are each courp'secl of three alexan- clrines followecl by a hexasyllable, i.e. \ z, r z, r z, 6. ihe scansion of the 6rsr stanza irrrmecliately rnakes several things clcar about the regular rrlcx- ancirine: It has a r fixed meclial caesurâ (marked //) after the sixth syllable, r.vhich enforces an accenr (stress) rn the sixth syllable. The only uth", oblligntu,y accent in the lirre falls on the final (rwelfth) syllable. z Tlre caesurit is a metrical j'ncrure rvhich us'ally c.ircicles lvith a signifìcant syntactical juncture (a'd rhus a pause), f<¡r reasons which wilr beco.re appa'enr. ßut it is fìrsr and forenrtxt the rine's principal pciinr of rhythuric articulation, not its rnosr obtrusive synractic break. -
The Craft of Poetry
THE CRAFT OF POETRY This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call “dialogical poetics.” This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. Here, Derek Attridge and Henry Staten agree to rein in their own interpretive ingenuity and “minimally interpret” poems – reading them with careful regard for what the poem can be shown to actually say, in detail and as a whole, from opening to closure. Based on a series of e-mails, the book explores a number of topics in the reading of poetry, including historical and intellectual context, modernist difficulty, the role of criticism, and translation. This highly readable book will appeal to anyone who enjoys poetry, offering an inspiring resource for students whilst also mounting a challenge to some of the approaches to poetry currently widespread in the academy. Derek Attridge is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK and a Fellow of the British Academy. Henry Staten is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington, USA. This page intentionally left blank THE CRAFT OF POETRY Dialogues on minimal interpretation Derek Attridge and Henry Staten Add AddAdd Add Add Add Add AddAddAdd AddAdd AddAdd First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Derek Attridge and Henry Staten The right of Derek Attridge and Henry Staten to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. -
Reuven Tsur Poetic Rhythm. Structure and Performance. an Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics
Studia Metrica et Poetica 1.1, 2014, 142–148 Reuven Tsur Poetic Rhythm. Structure and performance. An empirical study in cognitive poetics. 2nd ed. Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2012 (A review article) Eva Lilja The second edition of Reuven Tsur’s Poetic Rhythm exceeds the old one from 1998 with a hundred pages. Only minor changes have been added to the first ten chapters but the four new ones give a broader and also more relaxed exten- sion to his subject. The new last chapter specifies his critique against older ver- sification studies and gives more room for discussing the problem of meaning production in versification. Poetic Rhythm aims at giving empirical evidence for a cognitive theory of versification, as presented in Tsur’s book of 1977,Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre. Nowadays, this book is almost impossible to get a hold of – for exam- ple, no library in Sweden owns it. Nevertheless, this is Tsur’s first important publication where he establishes cognitive poetics, a hot subject in aesthetic discussions today. He repudiates the idea that poetic rhythm might be analysed as a kind of object and instead asserts its character as grounded in perception. To prove this, he uses Gestalt psychology and findings in neuroscience with a focus on short time memory. If poetic rhythm takes place in the human perception, where is it possible to investigate? The performance offers a possibility to study poetic rhythm. Tsur has collected an impressive amount of interesting poetry readings that demonstrate complicated solutions to contradictory formulations. We are pre- sented with a huge amount of details concerning tone curves, peakings, delays and so on.