Amazon.com: Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line (E L S Monograph Series) (9780920604557): Peter L. Groves: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1998 | ISBN-10: 0920604552 | ISBN-13: 978-0920604557

_Strange Music_ attempts to provide, through a new analysis of metrical and prosodic form in the iambic pentameter line, a more powerful and precise tool for stylistic investigation and description than its traditionalist, musicalist, or generative antecedents. Laying particular emphasis on metre as something negotiated in performance, it seeks to reconcile literary and linguistic approaches in a post-generative theoretical synthesis. The book includes some discussion of what might be called metatheoretical issues in metrics.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } _Strange Music_ attempts to provide, through a new analysis of metrical and prosodic form in the iambic pentameter line, a more powerful and precise tool for stylistic investigation and description than its traditionalist, musicalist, or generative antecedents. Laying particular emphasis on metre as something negotiated in performance, it seeks to reconcile literary and linguistic approaches in a post-generative theoretical synthesis. The book includes some discussion of what might be called metatheoretical issues in metrics.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Peter L. Groves was born in Shropshire, England, in 1954, and studied at the universities of Exeter and Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. on Shakespeare's metrics. He now lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife Stella and innumerable dogs, and teaches in the English Department of Monash University. He has recently published (with Geoffrey G. Hiller) _Samuel Daniel: Selected Poems and "A Defence of Rhyme"_ (Pegasus Press, Asheville, NC: 1998), and a number of articles in the _Encyclopedia of Semiotics_, ed. P. Bouissac (OUP: New York, 1998; both titles available from Amazon.com), and is currently working on the theory of verse movement. AUTHCOMMENTS: This book originated in an attempt to investigate Shakespeare's metrical style, and my consequent dissatisfaction with the traditional kind of scansion as crude and subjective. Its emphasis is thus on practical stylistics: it tries to incorporate just enough prosodic complexity to permit a meaningful discrimination among metrical styles. Please feel free to E-mail me (Peter.Groves@arts.monash.edu.au) if you have comments, suggestions or objections.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the preface: Over the past twenty-five years the percolation of post-structuralist literary theories through departments of English has gradually transformed the discipline, problematizing almost every aspect of the production and reception of texts. Yet given the importance of Saussurean ideas to the nouvelle critique it is a curious irony that one of the few pockets of the old criticism" to be left unmolested should be traditional humanist metrics, with its dogged empiricism, its essentialist view of language and its superstitious fear of linguistics. No doubt there are historical reasons for this neglect, not the least of them being the fact that metrics has never been particularly fashionable as a field of study: for much of the past century, indeed, it has tended to be the happy hunting-ground of poets _manqus_ and retired headmasters with bees in their bonnets. But these are not good reasons to remain content with an account of the matter cobbled together from the cast-offs of classical Latin, however congenial it may have seemed to Saintsbury and Quiller-Couch. It is the aim of this study to provide something more powerful, more precise and more productive" for the stylistic analysis of sophisticated or literary" English metres.

The system is objective in that it is based in the linguistic realities of English prosody; it is not, however (nor could any system be) wholly objective in the sense that a computer could use it as an algorithm to scan definitively every line in a text. This is because metre is an ordering of speech, and the prosodic shape of an utterance must depend in part upon its context, or what linguistics call pragmatics; in any performative art, moreover, there is an element of interpretive latitude. Total objectivity was an ignis fatuus of the linguistic metrists of the 1970s, who programmatically disregarded the dimension of performance. My system is objective in the sense that where there are variant readings, it can predict and explain them: it represents, in other words, a map of possibilities. I do not, of course, wish to claim that it is the last word in metrical analysis of the pentameter: as in the case of a scientific theory, its ambition is to become obsolete.

This book is intended in the first instance for a literary rather than a linguistic readership: for people, that is, who might have a practical use for an objective system of scansion of iambic pentameter in such fields as bibliographical studies, the attribution or editing of texts, and stylistic investigation in general, areas in which metrical analysis is now rather rarely employed not, I suspect, because rhythm and metre are felt to be irrelevant, but because the available instruments of dissection seem too blunt and too subjective. Consequently I have assumed a reader who is innocent of linguistics, but prepared to be introduced to some necessary linguistic terms and notions, besides the small amount of jargon necessitated by the theory itself a necessity that I regret, but cannot honestly apologize for: as Seymour Chatman put it, Metrics owes it to its own self-respect to define its terms and stick to them, even at the risk of losing stylistic polish". In my experience the system, in its essentials, can be usefully taught to reasonably advanced undergraduates, since the initial increase in complexity is amply repaid by a naturalness, consistency and transparency in application that are foreign to the practice of traditional metrics.

At this point, some readers will wish to protest that an objective account of metrical form in the pentameter is impossible; others, that it already exists somewhere. Part of this work, therefore, is devoted to addressing these objections. Yet a reader who is willing to grant that the project is both possible and necessary may still wonder why one more attempt should succeed where so many have failed: a vast amount of time and zeal, after all, has been spent on the problems posed by what John Crowe Ransome calls the strange music of English verse." But while one can agree that English prosody" has on the whole made fairly unrewarding reading, its inadequacies can generally be explained: much of its crankiness and irrelevance, for example, arises from the traditionally empiricist and belle-lettrist approach of the prosodists themselves, and their consequent refusal to consider linguistic findings or to theorize about their own procedures to ask questions like what is the ontological status of metrical form?", what are the goals of a metrical theory?", how can we test the efficacy of such a theory?", and so on.

It is true that in recent years metrics has ceased to be a harmless hobbyhorse for English eccentrics and acquired instead the rebarbative status of a minor branch of linguistics, but it has done so without (or so it may seem to critics) passing through the stage of being useful: linguistic metrics represents for most non-linguistic readers merely a novel way of being tedious and irrelevant. Yet we should not be too quick to blame the traditional parochialism of the humanities: those linguists who have investigated metre as a structuring of language have shown themselves too ready to disregard entire traditions of writing and thinking about the subject that cannot be immediately reconciled with their approach. It is the besetting sin of metrists not to listen to each other, and thus to be incapable of building on prior insights: many writers have drawn attention to the traditionally combative mode of prosodic discourse, in which each new projector begins with a ritual dance on the bodies of his foes". The truth is that any approach that succeeds in convincing someone other than its originator must have something of value in it: must have illuminated some small corner of the subject, if only at the expense of throwing the rest into greater shadow. The theory set forth here represents what I would call a post-generative synthesis: it incorporates and reconciles insights from such disparate approaches as generative metrics, musicalism and humanist scansion. I should add that this synthesis was not an end that I consciously aimed at, but rather something that (to my surprise) emerged gradually from my research: the virtue of syncretism was thrust upon me.